The end of the world as we know it, complete with 24-style dialogue and enough oozy bits to make Tom Savini queasy.
The apocalypse goes viral in the sequel to the gorefest Dead of Night (2011) as a viral outbreak and a hurricane wreak havoc on Stebbins, Pennsylvania.
Less a sequel than just another chapter in the large-scale zombie-infested world drawn by Maberry (Fire & Ash, 2013, etc.), this bloody, violent and testosterone-filled epic still teeters on the verge of parody, style-wise, but remains popcorn-shoveling awesome for fans of George Romero and The Evil Dead. To recap, a mad scientist created a virus called Lucifer 113 as a punishment for serial killer Homer Gibbon, the “patient zero” of the outbreak. Police officer Desdemona Fox is protecting survivors in a small school along with online hack Billy Trout. After already attacking the school once, the White House has ordered a media blackout as authorities deal with a superstorm and contemplate dropping thermobaric bombs to wipe out everyone. Meanwhile, the resurrected Gibbon is spreading the faith in his own way, terrifying Trout’s partner Goat Weinman. “I done this,” he says. “This plague thing. It ain’t no bioweapon like they’re saying on the radio. It was me that done this. The black eye opened in my mind and now I speak with the voice of the red mouth.” Most of the action stays with Desdemona, Homer or the White House, but Maberry also drops in gruesome but sometimes-humorous vignettes with secondary characters, always ratcheting up the gore factor to cartoonish levels. In an interesting choice, the novel also introduces a character who ties the series neatly together with Maberry’s YA series, Rot and Ruin. It’s all a bit over-the-top, but the vast scope of the novel makes for a satisfying contrast to the smaller-scale portrayals of similar catastrophes in The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later.
The end of the world as we know it, complete with 24-style dialogue and enough oozy bits to make Tom Savini queasy.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03494-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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