A sprawling and inventive dark comedy.
A strange species of beetle throws a venture capitalist’s life into chaos in Brannon’s debut novel.
Herman Glüber is an unethical, athletic, homophobic, cocaine-using, impeccably groomed dealmaker at a Seattle venture capital firm. He has an enviable office in the iconic Smith Tower and a beautiful girlfriend named Margot—though he’s not hugely fond of Margot’s 12-year-old son, Ethan, who has a peculiar interest in insects. Herman has just closed a deal on an asset he’s particularly excited about—an apple orchard on the banks of the Wenatchee River that can be sliced into valuable lots—but when he goes out celebrating with his co-workers, he encounters a a tarot card reader who gives him a dire warning. Madame Laverne Korzha de las Bulgarias tells him that there’s something wrong with the deal, that someone he looks up to will turn into a monster, and that someone will die. Part of Herman’s problem is the appearance in Seattle of an invasive species of beetle that feeds on electricity. He’s not the only one suffering, though, as a whole cast of intersecting lives scrambles to deal with the power outages and unusual happenings that plague Washington state. These include Herman’s colleague, hipster-yuppie Loven Boilee; the representative of the apple orchard’s undocumented workers, Lupita Bevilacqua, who’s spurned Herman’s advances in the past; Jodie Cavendish, a CIA operative on the trail of the dangerous beetle; Saint Stephen Rheese, a marijuana smuggler trying to save his sick niece; and Duncan Klevit, Herman’s boss, who’s also a serial killer. If they can’t get a handle on the situation, the beetles may well turn Washington into a version of their native region of Inner Mongolia: a technological desert known as Deadland.
Brannon’s prose is dry and precise, which lends itself to moments of terror and humor, by turns: “Mass hysteria and panic ensued when the assembly of horror movie fans were forced to evacuate the Cinerama as the bugs shorted out the power….It was already a busy night in Seattle. The Eagles were in town for their final farewell tour…singing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling.’ ” Despite the messy, disaster-movie premise (and the opening pages of joke blurbs from people with such names as “Opal Winfrey” and “George Slanders”), Brannon generally plays the main plot pretty straight. Some scenes are quite tense, and a gripping sense of dread grows as one goes deeper into the story. Herman starts out as a thoroughly intolerable character, but the emergency offers him opportunities to evolve, Scrooge-like, into something better. If the novel has a flaw, it is its nearly 450-page length, which is achieved less by a proliferation of events than by the fact that nearly every scene is drawn out a bit too much. Even so, the characters and prose style are generally compelling, and the cartoonishly apocalyptic scenario manages to feel relevant and chillingly believable in this age of unlikely plagues. Readers will find much to enjoy here, and they’ll likely look forward to Brannon’s next offering.
A sprawling and inventive dark comedy.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9862101-2-9
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Odysseus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.
The discovery that a revered artist’s sculpture contains a human bone sets off scandal and violence.
Art historian James Becker has what seems like a sweet deal. He’s the curator of the collection of the Fairburn Foundation, housed at a stately home owned by the Lennox family: Sebastian, Becker’s best friend, and his bitter mother, Lady Emmeline. Becker’s wife, Helena, was Sebastian’s fiancee first, but they’re all very civilized about it and happily awaiting the birth of her baby. The centerpiece of the Fairburn collection is works by the late Vanessa Chapman, an artist about whom Becker wrote his thesis, and with whom he is somewhat obsessed. Partly, it’s because of her great talent, but she was also a glamorous figure, a beauty who, as she became successful, sequestered herself on an isolated Scottish tidal island called Eris. She had a dark side—lots of stormy relationships, plus a philandering mooch of a husband who vanished without a trace a few decades ago. Her reputation, though, has risen after her death—so much so that the Fairburn has loaned some of her works to the Tate Modern. That’s where a forensic anthropologist sees one of her sculptures, made of found objects that include what’s described as an animal bone. The scientist is sure the bone is human, and soon Becker finds himself scrambling to prevent scandal. Vanessa willed her works and papers to the foundation, but some of them are still on Eris, guarded by her longtime friend Grace Haswell. A retired doctor, Grace lived with Vanessa off and on over the years and nursed her through her fatal cancer. It was a surprise when Vanessa left her estate not to Grace but to Douglas Lennox, Emmeline’s husband and Sebastian’s father. Douglas was Vanessa’s gallerist and lover, but the two had a nasty falling-out. Sebastian is so frustrated by Grace’s refusal to turn over all of the bequest that he’s ready to sue her, but Becker believes he can negotiate, so off to the the island he goes. He finds far more treachery and shocking secrets than he expected, past and present alike. Hawkins keeps her cast tight, her wild setting ominous, and her plot moving fast.
This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9780063396524
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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