The novelistic equivalent of a band jam session, with riffs well-worth listening to.
The latest from Sallis, best known for his Lew Griffin detective series and for Drive (2006), the basis for the Ryan Gosling film of the same name.
This slim book features a rarity for Sallis, a female narrator. Abducted at 8 and confined for two years to a padlocked box beneath her captor's bed, Jenny Rowan escaped at 10 and took up residence in the Westwood Mall, where, for 18 months of scavenging and contentment, she managed to evade detection. After the legend of "Mall Girl" grew and she was discovered by a security guard, Jenny ended up in the juvenile system until she petitioned for her independence on her 16th birthday. As the novel begins, Jenny, now an adult who works as an editor for a public television station, is approached by a kindly cop who somehow knows, despite sealed records, about her history and who enlists her to give whatever advice or solace she can to a young woman who's gone through a similar ordeal. Jenny is a survivor's survivor: forthright, no-nonsense, scarred but never bowed, with great compassion but none of the illusions about human nature that sometimes accompany good-heartedness. Amid political turmoil and disaster in an imagined nearfuture, she takes in the horrifically battered young woman, aids a group of squatters, reunites (in a way) with part of her family, embarks on a romance, performs feats of footage editing, and becomes, eventually, the staggeringly unlikely confidante of the president of the United States. Loose, improvisational, not infrequently sloppy and—as the foregoing synopsis suggests—dizzyingly overloaded with plot, the novel would seem doomed, but amid the pulpy turns and the missing transitions, there's a surprising power: Jenny is an irresistible character, and there are flashes here of insight and sweetness.
The novelistic equivalent of a band jam session, with riffs well-worth listening to.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-209-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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