A consummate fusion of serial killer tale and coming-of-age story; disturbing but unquestionably captivating.
A New York high schooler aims his teen angst squarely at animal abusers, becoming increasingly more violent and ultimately lethal, in Taylor’s debut thriller.
Like most kids his age, Travis struggles as a high school sophomore, with no real friends and the occasional target of bullies. But he sees humanity in general as the problem, best exemplified by a couple of punks he spies in the early morning hours tormenting a stray puppy. Travis confronts the goons and luckily comes out on top; the guys flee and the dog’s OK. This, however, seems to awaken in Travis a deep-rooted animosity for people guilty of animal cruelty. So he actively seeks those who harm pets (typically dogs), looking into documented animal abuse cases and getting a job with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Travis comes face to face with atrocious men, and he slowly becomes unhinged. To handle the more brutal side of the assaults, he develops an alter ego—a “trusted friend” that begins as a voice but is eventually a physical manifestation that Travis regularly sees and engages in conversation. Travis’ attacks turn into full-scale torture, and he doesn’t always leave his victims still breathing. He tries his best to hide his late-night excursions from his mom, Carol, and his stepdad, Big Mike, not an easy feat when cops investigating recent murders are Big Mike’s buddies. Travis will undoubtedly be a champion for animal lovers, a fact that the narrative overstates a bit, declaring his intentions “nothing short of divine.” But Taylor doesn’t glorify Travis’ rage: a scene of the boy cooing over a rescued kitty soon after he’s stabbed someone manages to be simultaneously endearing and unsettling. Travis, too, garners sympathy through his adolescent life: a potential romance with college girl Kelly is cut short by a thoughtless joke, leading her friends to label him a racist unjustly. Taylor loads his story with colloquialisms that are unpolished but to the point, like “bleak-ass world.” And the ending, while somewhat anticlimactic, is wonderfully open-ended, leaving Travis’ fate—will he pay for his crimes or not? —subject to interpretation.
A consummate fusion of serial killer tale and coming-of-age story; disturbing but unquestionably captivating.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2016
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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