A tenacious, concise collection of vignettes with a fierce attitude, although some parts feel underdeveloped.
Bradley’s raw collection combines stories and poems about a brutal childhood, military service, and life in a flophouse.
“My home state, Kentucky, is like some weird b-movie about travelling in time to the past,” the author writes in an essay about his earliest years and his attempts to resolve his feelings about where he spent them. It’s a place where, as a child, he kissed a Black girl and an old lady called him “white trash,” as he notes in a poem titled “Trash.” He tells of his violent father abusing him and of his father’s third wife’s slamming his hand in a car door. In another poem, he describes his father’s untimely end: “My father died at 41 years old / of heart disease / or karma, / or whatever you want to call it.” Drawing on memories of a combat stint in the Army in the Middle East, he rails against a military that wants emotionless killers but sends them back into society with no preparation. Accounts of years of drug abuse in a Corpus Christi, Texas, flophouse follow, including a nine-year relationship with a Mexican woman who was a blackout drunk: “If I had a dollar for every time she threw up on me, I’d have about ten dollars.” Reflections on this era include a story about a meeting with an old sex-worker friend who died days after their reunion, causing the author to conclude: “There is almost no redemption.” Over the course of this collection, Bradley’s in-your-face, no-regrets style allows him to paint a fiery portrait of an anti-establishment personality who has ample reason to dislike the police, the government, and abusers. The people in these pages live in a hard-luck universe where the author learned to live by his own rules. The childhood stories are the most chilling ones here, and they seem to inform his perspective in other pieces, although his adulthood brought ample hardship as well. There’s a bit too much bragging about sexual prowess, though, and the poetry feels thin and lacks substance when compared to the essays.
A tenacious, concise collection of vignettes with a fierce attitude, although some parts feel underdeveloped.Pub Date: July 12, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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