Flawed horror, but suitably creepy.
A malevolent mountain terrorizes the village folk who live below.
In what might be rural Switzerland, residents of a hamlet face a quandary. Their animals have little good to feed on but the lush grass growing in Sasseneire, the pasture high on the local mountain at 7,500 feet. Two decades earlier, the mountain had given the townsfolk such a fright that they have avoided it ever since. But such a pity: “all that grass up there going to waste.” Dare they try again? “Don’t you know, they have the sickness up there!” “No one actually believes any more in those stories, except a handful of old men.” After contentious debate, they vote yes. Young Joseph joins a work crew so he can earn enough money to marry Victorine, who waits anxiously at home. Workers bring their animals up the mountain and hear mysterious noises at night, portending evil. They sense an undefined Him, aka the Other, or the Evil One. Indeed, something up there hates them, and that’s the nut of this spooky tale. There are lovely descriptions decorated by similes galore, such as “the air moved like when a bed sheet is shaken by its four corners.” Taken individually, most comparisons work well. Taken as a whole, they are like the effort of a writer who is trying too hard. Many passages enhance the mood: “The shadows had retreated into the objects that had brought them forth.” But there is a darker portent than the shadows. A worker gets a splinter in his thumb, and his body becomes “black and swollen.…He rotted before he died.” There’s a puzzling episode in which another worker, Romain, uses his ramrod-loaded rifle to shoot at and miss a jay, blowing away his hand instead: “tatters of skin…were all that was left of the fingers of his left hand.” You don’t have to be a gun enthusiast to know how improbable that is. And some readers might find annoying the apparently random switches from past tense to present. One example of many: “He gets up. He was ashamed for himself.” Yet there are great lines as well, such as “misfortunes marry one another, they make children.” That’s surely true on this mountain.
Flawed horror, but suitably creepy.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781953861825
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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