A wickedly entertaining but also grotesque teen nightmare that’s pretty much Stranger Things meets Rogue One.
Weirdness invades a small Oregon town as a government experiment gone wrong escapes containment.
Where to start with the pop-culture influences that erupt in this second novel by Johnson, author of the novel Skullcrack City (2015) and the story collection Entropy in Bloom (2017)? It opens with a Goonies/Super 8 vibe: There's a bunch of high school misfits led by Lucy, a Peruvian adoptee whose closest friend is “Bucket” Marwani, whose Pakistani heritage makes him another brown kid targeted for abuse by their classmates. The nightmarish scenario goes all Stephen King’s Cell when one of the kids’ classmates goes berserk and kills a teacher before perishing himself. In the meantime, we’re getting broadcasts from the Nightwatchman, a self-styled radio shock jock pulling the curtain back on the utter weirdness erupting in Turner Falls, Oregon, á la Welcome to Night Vale. When things really kick off, it looks like a modernization of the townies-versus–rich-kids trope until the whole thing goes to hell and Lucy and her posse are just fighting for their lives. If you’re into this kind of thing, there are some carrots, like Lucy having her first kiss, which is kind of sweet, but as our heroes descend into the (inevitably) human-made nightmare, it gets pretty grotesque. Is there a secret laboratory? Check—in the supersecret IMTECH facility near our little village of idiots—making something that has gotten completely out of control. Lucy is a fierce protagonist, but from this point it evolves into a wetwork nightmare straight out of Chuck Wendig’s daydreams. There’s some prescient dark humor here, too: “Shoot, man. Maybe. That’s usually how it goes, right? But I don’t know about this situation. The whole city is on fire, man. I don’t think these guys are checking bank balances before they start murdering people. Could be the old rules, rich, poor, none of it means much anymore.”
A wickedly entertaining but also grotesque teen nightmare that’s pretty much Stranger Things meets Rogue One.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5429-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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
A pulpy, peek-between-your-fingers look at small-town America, powered by real grief.
Three emotionally fragile college students head into the Appalachian wilderness to film a class project about roadside memorials.
Despite some fairly purposeful Blair Witch Project vibes and an atmosphere positively seething with menace, this slice of hillbilly horror has trouble sticking the landing. It’s a good premise, bordering on cliche: three students at Pennsylvania’s York College are teamed up in May 1983 by their eclectic American Studies professor Marcus Tyree to explore a topic of their choice related to American society. Our narrator is Billy Anderson, 19, an orphan traumatized by the death of his parents in a tragic accident, leaving him to be raised by his doting Aunt Helen. Troy Carpenter is curious but anxious, rattled by the death of his little brother in a drive-by shooting. Melody Wise is the oldest of the trio at 23, but is still reeling from the death of her mother. Their collective project is “Roadside Memorials: A Study of Grief and Remembrance,” a documentary for which the students plan to investigate these memorials and interview survivors, starting with Billy’s parents and their memorial in Sudbury, Pennsylvania. Other than an abundance of accidents, their subjects seem ordinary but the omens and totems that start appearing are anything but. Among these are an ominous hitchhiker, a flat tire, a dead animal, and a common symbol appearing on each memorial—all escalating events that lead to bloody and unexpected consequences. At first, the setup seems a little Scooby-Doo, replete with small-town secrets, concealed identities, and the odd unmasking. Our three leads are very likeable, but their bickering can lean towards the soap-operatic. Thankfully, Chizmar, a veteran at writing pedestrian horror in the vein of his occasional co-author Stephen King, gives the story enough of a whiff of the otherworldly, complete with an evil cult, to keep readers on edge before some late-stage twists strain the book’s hard-won authenticity.
A pulpy, peek-between-your-fingers look at small-town America, powered by real grief.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781668009192
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
