A consuming work of great unpredictability and power.
A suicidal man living through a global health crisis realizes he’s immortal in McCarty’s novel.
Louie lives in a tiny town in Northern Michigan and is considered by all, including himself, a lifelong loser. An out-of-work mechanic, he decides to kill himself, but he fails repeatedly; for reasons he cannot understand, he is immortal, a peculiar condition for a man who longs to end his own life. Even stranger is the fact that everyone else is dying—the world is engulfed by a flulike virus, a “biotic crisis” that’s mercilessly killing nearly every human in a mass extinction event, a horrifying catastrophe chillingly portrayed by the author. Eventually, Louie is the last surviving resident of his town, and he calls a newspaper to report it; this is how he meets Katherine, the woman who answers the phone and thereafter becomes the object of his dreams. She dreams of him, too, and she drives from New Jersey to Michigan to find him. Louie shares his bizarre secret with her and comes to believe she’s like him, incapable of death, and that they are meant to “rebuild the world as Adam and Eve.” This crumbling world is a dangerous place, however, and they’re threatened by another man with a different plan, a man who may also be immortal. This is not a formulaic apocalyptic novel—in fact, it’s surprisingly inventive and delightfully weird. Both Louie and Katherine are depicted in nuanced, even tender terms, two sad people who have both struggled with suicidal intentions. The story’s conclusion is a touch sentimental—the author can’t help but draw a banal therapeutic lesson from the tale—but that doesn’t ruin an otherwise refreshingly original novel that enchants even as it terrifies.
A consuming work of great unpredictability and power.Pub Date: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781941175026
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Crazy Pages
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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