Warm up the VCR and fire up the air popper for a most bitchin’ horror story by a gifted practitioner of these dark arts.
A woman returns home to bury her parents only to find a spectacularly terrifying blast from the past waiting for her.
By now, Hendrix is deep-dipped in 1970s and '80s horror tropes after depicting a haunted IKEA in Horrorstör (2014) and subsequent excursions into vampirism, exorcism, serial slaying, and the like. This one is set in the present day, but Hendrix is hooked up to another Stephen King IV drip, nicely emulating the elder’s penchant for everyday human drama while elevating the creep factor with his own disquieting imagination. Louise Joyner is beyond disbelief when her estranged brother, Mark, calls to tell her their parents are dead after a suspicious car accident. As she reluctantly returns home to Charleston, South Carolina, the underachieving Mark is already plotting to cheat her out of her half of the house, while a pair of quixotic aunts try to make peace between the two. One sticking point is the fate of the hundreds of dolls their mother, Nancy, made, collected, curated, and obsessed over. Mark’s boneheaded schemes; Louise’s yearning for her 5-year-old daughter, Poppy; and their collective grief introduce the tale, but Hendrix wastes no time in ratcheting the Pennywise vibes up to 11. It’s little surprise that the siblings’ secret tormentor is Pupkin, their mother’s very favorite puppet—"The one who made Louise’s skin crawl. The one she hated the most.” Pupkin is newly prone to temper tantrums and homicidal rage when he doesn’t get what he wants—and since he can’t yet conceptualize that Nancy is dead, he just wants her back home with him. Horrific visions of anthropomorphic dolls, a bloody, near-fatal misadventure, and emotional extortion including nail-biting child peril soon follow. Pupkin the killer puppet doesn’t have the foul mouth of Chucky or the primal menace of the aforementioned clown, but the combination of Hendrix’s trippy take on the stages of grief and a plethora of nightmare fuel delivers a retro wallop for those in the mood.
Warm up the VCR and fire up the air popper for a most bitchin’ horror story by a gifted practitioner of these dark arts.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-20126-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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