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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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