A headlong charge through the process of becoming—an artist, an adult, a nobody, something, anything.
In this surgical examination of being young, female, and unfulfilled, debut author George employs not just a scalpel, but a whole kit of ominous and eerily specific instruments.
Acerbic and sly, this five-story collection explores the elaborate performance of identity and the palliative comfort of opting out of self-obsessed scenesterism, giving a knowing flick of the hand to artistic imitators and impostors alike. Plunging up to her elbows into the morass of (post)modern living, George picks apart things often mistaken for love (desperation, fearful neediness, projected desires, ego propping) and maturity (partnering, parenting, settling into a beige-and-vanilla existence after a clean break with youthful pursuits). Details accumulate haltingly, stepwise, like bits of a dream remembered upon waking, even as they threaten to slip from the dreamer's grasp, and George walks us through a thick fog with a dim flashlight alongside characters who can't quite apprehend the rules of the familiar-but-foreign places into which they've been flung. In "Guidance/The Party," a woman is brusquely prepped by a recondite entity, known only as "The Guide," for an adulthood more like an afterlife than a continuation of her earlier existence. In the title story, a cross between a reincarnation tale, an anxiety dream, and a particularly prurient version of “The Sims,” the narrator is given the chance to start over—from where, what, and by whom is never revealed—as a young woman of uncertain age in a place like a spurious micronation on the cusp of collapse. Though George occasionally dips into gratuitous weirdness and has a tendency toward list-making that can become tedious, overall these stories satisfy as they spit out one sardonic insight after the next. Take "Futures In Child Rearing," on the confusion, anxiety, and pressures that surround procreation: "I'm trying to have a baby. I'd like to name her Ocean, but I fear the implications: the void, the vast emptiness, the unknown, big whale shits, giant octopuses, or other possible hentai tentacle situations. I put my finger in the ovulation machine: Transaction Declined, it reads on the screen." By the final story, "Instruction," we can't be sure if we've been given a glimpse into a future where our absurdities have played out to their furthest extremes or perhaps the actual present, only we haven't quite realized yet the extent of our collective abjection.
A headlong charge through the process of becoming—an artist, an adult, a nobody, something, anything.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9973666-2-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Dorothy
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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