An ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying coming-of-spirituality tale.
A young man grows up to discover a connection to the paranormal in Deur’s debut novel.
As the story begins, 12-year-old Angelo Novakis haunted by thoughts of suicide by gun. Over the course of the novel, he not only confronts his own dark desires, but also bears witness to how such urges play out in others’ lives. As the tale follows Angelo from his youth to adulthood, it becomes a broader investigation of what makes his life meaningful. Early on, he has visions of himself as a knight fighting a shadowy opponent in a forest long ago; these visions soon inspire a long education in the occult. Angelo becomes versed in multiple religions and possible theories to explain his apparently fantastical experiences. The hero becomes a Platonic inquisitor as he challenges ideas that he encounters over the years—eventually writing a memoir of his visions called Somnia Praeterita. The novel’s second half is that very book, which concerns Luka Dragovic, who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries; it turns out that Angelo has been having visions of events in Luka’s life ever since he was a child. Deur experiments with form in this novel, and the notion of a book within a book being the climax of a story is engaging. However, this experiment goes awry, as there are too many threads left untied in both halves of the book for it to feel like a unified whole. Although the opening of the novel teases Angelo’s self-destruction, in the end, he simply vanishes from the novel, with some parts of his story left incomplete and unresolved. Both sections, but especially the first half, suffer from overwriting, with large swaths of expository text where shorter scenes might have offered better illustrations of complex ideas; the book also tends to state its characters’ thoughts and feelings rather than showing them through action. Indeed, some sections simply feel like lists, and the dialogue often consists of wishful monologues and unrealistic diatribes rather than genuine conversation. There are definitely intriguing ideas here, but they’re lost in a sea of ramble.
An ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying coming-of-spirituality tale.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2020
ISBN: 979-8677399909
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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