Surreal, poetic and unforgettable: a truly original voice.
In this one-of-a-kind novel, a South Florida man living with hallucinations falls in love and meets danger along the way.
Aubrey Shallcross, 42, “was a respectable businessman in his small town and had learned how to appear normal since grade school, even though he…saw things other people did not”—such as Triple Suiter, a 3-inch-tall, three-piece-suited man who lives in Aubrey’s left armpit. Independently wealthy after selling his car dealership (friends dub him the Anti-Chrysler), Aubrey enjoys hanging out at the Blue Goose and eating conch fritters with old buddies like Punky and The Junior. Over the course of this unique debut novel, he sees some friends die, falls in love, surfs, participates in a cattle roundup, learns the art and discipline of dressage, and undergoes a fearful attack by his girlfriend’s palindrome-obsessed ex-husband. But no plot summary can convey the surreal flavor of Aubrey’s mind and the characters (called “slippers”) who manifest themselves to him. Besides Triple Suiter, a kind of guardian angel, there’s “the tiny Amper Sand, who lived in Trip’s sternum and didn’t speak. To communicate, Amper Sand typed backward letters on Trip’s chest.” The sinister Slim Hand, “rogue slipper, a bad passenger,” always seems to be trying to cram something bad down Aubrey’s throat. Head Wound is “a burlesque overdraft of an abnormal.” In this word-drunk, thickly allusive and poetic novel, characters speak in an at-first confusing mélange of shared jokes and colorful imagery: “Straight over the four-way’s the road to stag-damn-nation….The Head Wound turns left with the angel on that crosspiece, doesn’t he? For the gorgeous left pearls. Finished.” Porter gradually illuminates the significance of these references. Though first-person accounts of schizophrenia usually convey its terror and loneliness, Aubrey’s experience is seldom frightening. His hallucinations are usually creative, helpful, even joyful, and Triple Suiter is touchingly solicitous of him. However bizarre Aubrey’s thought processes might be to outsiders, his inner world is artistically coherent.
Surreal, poetic and unforgettable: a truly original voice.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62550-149-3
Page Count: 262
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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