From one of our great deadpan absurdists—a new member of the club to which George Saunders, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin...
In Krusoe's latest surreal effort, a collection of oddballs living in (and never leaving) a strange underground apartment called the Burrow grapple with life's—and the afterlife's—mysteries.
The apartment, next to a vacant lot in a town called St. Nils, houses five "twilight souls, caught somewhere between dark and light, knowing and unknowing." There are no windows, leaving one of its tenants, Madeline, puzzled by all the mirrors, which "multiply the dark." She's sleeping with Viktor, a mud bath obsessive who hopes to get out of this place with money he makes online in the stock market. Previously, she was with Raymond, having taken up with him and his worrisome collection of duck decoys after leaving his sad-sack best friend, Jeffery. Completing the group is Heather, a phone sex operator writing a children's book, Ballerina Mouse, whose heroine has a deformed hind foot. Krusoe invokes a terrible cult TV show set in the 1960s featuring farmers, neo-Nazis, and a young woman named Heather—played by an actress who looked a lot like the apartment-dwelling Heather and got killed in a car accident at the exact time Heather of the Burrow said her name. Then there's the Captain, whose fluctuating "Death Quotient" tells him what percentage of him at a given moment is willing to call "the whole thing…over and done." Krusoe (Parsifal, 2012, etc.) can't resist winking at the reader, providing charts to make sure we're keeping the characters straight. But the book is as unsettling as it is funny. In questioning our very existence, it captures the kind of disorientation we experience in that brief interval between dreaming and waking.
From one of our great deadpan absurdists—a new member of the club to which George Saunders, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin belong—comes a book of unearthly delights that will have you, too, wondering nervously what that incessant grinding sound is.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941040-18-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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