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
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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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