An extension of a genre-busting narrative, maintaining and complicating its vibes.
VanderMeer extends his Southern Reach trilogy with a deeper exploration of worlds both creepy and bureaucratic.
The charm (and frustration) of VanderMeer’s epic saga about the mysterious Area X is how much information is withheld, making the reader unsure of where they stand until the story explodes into uncanny and horrifying terrain. In that regard, the fourth entry in the series sticks to type, roughly focused on events preceding and following the earlier books. The opening sections concern Old Jim, a Central investigator researching the first expeditions by biologists into the Forgotten Coast, which involved the introduction of alligators and unsettling encounters with the rabbits first met in Authority (2014), as well as a mysterious Rogue that may be working in league with a particularly aggressive alligator nicknamed the Tyrant. Later chapters focus on Lowry, an investigator on a later expedition into the region, observing his colleagues’ numbers rapidly whittled down as the malevolent Tyrant emerges. Lowry is profane—few books published in the past 10 years have a higher f-bomb-to-page ratio—and highly drugged, elements that enliven the story in two ways. They convey the contempt and frustration with institutions that have been a hallmark of the Southern Reach series; more ingeniously, they underscore the latter chapters’ surrealistic, psychedelic brand of horror, which helps sell some more grotesque incidents Lowry becomes a part of. Indeed, Lowry’s sections feature some of the most vivid writing in the entire series, sinuous and delightfully weird. Does VanderMeer resolve lingering questions from the previous novels? Not really. But the main theme of the trilogy was always unknowability—untrustworthy leaders, reckless wildlife, and complicated humans are his constant focus, and here he cannily balances the strangeness with the terror of confronting it. And it’s fair to suspect the terror will go on: As he writes, “Nothing in the end could placate Area X.”
An extension of a genre-busting narrative, maintaining and complicating its vibes.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780374616595
Page Count: 528
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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