Part character study, part drug-induced nightmare—take a hit.
Set in the American Southwest, Stackhouse’snovel follows a recovering addict escaping the grasp of her vicious ex-lover, but once she begins settling into a new, comfortable life, she discovers her ugly past has been on her tail since the moment she left.
Tiny, now an aging desert punker nearing her 30s, went in and out of broken homes and foster care as a child, making her vulnerable with a tough-as-nails exterior—a recipe, in this case, for drawing in the wrong kind of people. She spends years going on tour as a drummer in the band Nowhoresville and, after a show, meets Kyle, a good-looking hospital attendant capable of turning her on in ways she could never imagine. Kyle and Tiny begin an odd, secluded relationship, moving in together, taking drugs, roping a handful of naïve and horny men into twisted threesomes, and generally living a pitiful, gluttonous lifestyle. Shaded by the walls of their apartment, their perverse life together doesn’t exist on the outside. There comes a point, though, when Tiny can’t bear it any longer; she slips through Kyle’s manipulative clutches and runs—fast. In her absence, Kyle is consumed with his desire for revenge, and he gets creative in his madness and sadism, plucking away, seemingly at random, at anyone who has entered or exited Tiny’s life as a means to get to her and make her pay. Some of his most favored captives are the bandmates of Second Gunner,who are held for the entirety of his tumultuous rampage. They fight tooth-and-nail during their imprisonment, buying some time for the final showdown between Kyle and his beloved. The interwoven storylines skip around, reveal and omit in a skillfully crafted narrative that builds on its suspense. Rough and crude to varying degrees, the characters are mostly from the underbelly of the modern Southwest, and Stackhouse marvelously sets up their interactions, giving a taste of the redneck, hard-rock lifestyle. Tiny’s character, in particular, is notably complex and unknowingly manipulative in her passivity. Throughout the novel, her drug-addled memory loss syncs with the bizarre way her story unfolds as if in a clouded dream.
Part character study, part drug-induced nightmare—take a hit.Pub Date: June 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990422303
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Courtney Stackhouse
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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