An entertaining, inventive and occasionally over-the-top fantasy novel.
Helford (From a Killer’s Mind, 2013) offers a satirical tale of hell and damnation.
Nathaniel “Ate” Blovey is a failed writer of lurid Wild West stories. After his first and only book is a total failure and his girlfriend leaves him, things get even worse: His crude, low-quality writing is a big hit in Hell, so the Devil has him killed to write more hackwork for the damned. The outraged Ate refuses to fulfill the Devil’s wishes and goes on the run, making his way across a Hell that the world of the living never warned him about. Instead of confronting fire, brimstone and medieval imps, he struggles across a perdition that resembles America—specifically, the Old West. The Devil opted to give human souls free rein to build a civilization in Hell’s harsh, alien frontier, and things haven’t gone well. While Ate desperately tries to dodge Hell’s pitfalls, he deals with a cavalcade of absurd, damned souls who all have their own agendas—and some of them are his fans. He moves from misery to fear to fury and back again, facing calamity after calamity on the road to his own eternal destiny. The entire narrative is irreverent fun, with mild overtones of Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins. The pacing is fast and breezy, and the author does an admirable job of designing and describing his version of Hell and the fantastic rules that shape it. His clever, funny tale slyly points fingers at American outlooks and attitudes, although readers who are sensitive to profanity may not find this book to their liking. The characterization and dialogue are outlandishly over-the-top, in an amusing way; no human being has ever had a speech pattern quite like this book’s pompous protagonist (“Little did I know, it was much better received down here, and is surprisingly quite popular amongst the august personages of Hell”). Other supporting characters have equally theatrical personalities, and although most readers will hardly demand a purely naturalistic style in a satire, they may find it a little distracting at times.
An entertaining, inventive and occasionally over-the-top fantasy novel.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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