A gripping, entertaining, but sometimes uneven horror story.
A man desperately seeks to escape an old family curse in this novel.
In this tale from Dashner, the author of the Maze Runner series of YA adventures, events turn from SF to psychological horror. The story focuses on single father David Player, who’s trying his best to raise his four kids while continuing to deal with the long shadows of his own childhood trauma. As he drives his children through the South Carolina tobacco fields to their grandfather’s house, the narrative flashes back to his childhood encounters with a vicious, homegrown serial killer named Pee Wee Gaskins. In the present, David and his family finally reach the house. But Dicky, Pee Wee’s son, suddenly appears and proceeds to almost choke to death. The shocked David muses: “This son of a killer said he came to see me. He then choked on his own tongue, for no apparent reason. And my son, who’d never showed us the slightest hint that he knew the first thing about saving a person in such dire straits, had done just that.” Readers gradually come to realize alongside David that Pee Wee’s evil might not be done stalking his family. The author’s long writing experience is a double-edged sword in this novel. On the one hand, he skillfully crafts a riveting narrative; the first-person storytelling will keep readers turning pages. But on the other hand, habits picked up in a career of writing books for teenagers can yield some uneven prose (“There are many who think I’m a murderer,” confesses David early on. “Worse than a murderer. A monster. A monster so monstrous that never before has a world seen such a monstrous monster”) as well as some baffling turns of phrase (“But alas, it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as the lawyers are wont to say”). It’s bailiffs, not lawyers, who are wont to say this. There’s also a tendency to mimic the tinny, faux folksiness of Stephen King: “People around town said old Pee Wee Gaskins could dig a grave faster than Parson Fincher could say a burial prayer. I wasn’t so sure about that, but figured it’d be a tight race, anyhow.” Still, readers who can overlook these flaws will find a fun, chilling tale here.
A gripping, entertaining, but sometimes uneven horror story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-62601-608-8
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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
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