Imaginative and vicious, overflowing with sinister creations and a monumental struggle.
The third book in Black’s (The Death of Magic, 2013, etc.) epic urban fantasy series about a world of magic turned upside down.
This installment in the Saga of the New Gods sees a number of characters from prior books in ever more dire circumstances. In Book 1, a group of friends unleashed the mayhem of Dungeons and Dragons onto the real world; that mayhem continued and expanded in Book 2. This volume sees a deeper descent into a world populated by magical figures: nymphs (who “did not, in fact, live on sex”), Thor, a six-legged mutant cat named Mr. Mephistopheles, and more. There’s also an encroaching darkness known as the Abyss, home of the Dark Lord and other nefarious entities. Failure, as one character explains, means “all the world will be swallowed up in chaos and darkness for all eternity.” Thanks to the influx of magic, once-normal people have traded in their old personalities for fantastical ones, such as Dr. Mathias Dent, a medical researcher from prior books who now heads the Dark Lord’s research teams. The book takes readers to mythical, gory, and downright strange places. It’s frequently graphic—“The disgusting sound of crunching bones, and the wafting smell of blood from the other diner in his office, nearly ended his evening meal with his partially digested lunch all over his desk”—and always magical: “Magical energies crackled along his body, spitting and arcing out and to the ground.” There’s no shortage of novel creations, though some details may prove too over-the-top even for fantasy die-hards, as with Mr. Mephistopheles, who, once an alley cat, becomes “a great six-legged cat with two long whip-like tentacles that came out from his shoulders.” Dialogue can likewise seem a bit overcooked on occasion—“No, NO, NOOOO!!”—but fans of darker worlds à la Terry Brooks are likely to find portions to enjoy.
Imaginative and vicious, overflowing with sinister creations and a monumental struggle.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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