An imaginative back story and a rollicking plot make this an entertaining addition to the genre of occult fiction.
A university gets ensnared in a paranormal battle over a dangerous book in this debut horror novel.
Miskatonic University’s new president wants to shut down the college’s ancient and controversial Armitage Memorial Library Antiquities Section. Special Collections Curator Mercy O’Connor would rather be chugging lime-a-ritas than courting her family’s magic lineage that the library protects. Meanwhile, the warlord Obed Whateley disguises himself as Leland Janus and appeals to university president Armand Deale’s desire to shut down the Antiquities Section. Janus promises a handsome reward if Deale can get the Necronomicon, a powerful volume in the library. He’ll need the book by Hallow’s Mass, the legendary sacred holiday for Janus and his people. Deale enlists the intellectual prowess of Audrey Klumm-Weebner, and the help of a Native American and a social media buff to get the volume. The library chairman falls strangely ill, and with him gone, Deale and company create a smear campaign, claiming the Necronomicon belongs to its rightful people, the oppressed Dunwich. Mercy finds herself suddenly in charge of the library, and despite her best efforts to protect it, the Necronomicon falls into the wrong hands. By the time Deale and his companions realize who Janus really is, it might be too late to save the university town, and Mercy will have to step into her family’s heritage to find her purpose. Wit and humor color the novel, which includes hashtags as well as a heavy-handed satire of political correctness. The worldbuilding is thorough, explained by periodic articles, excerpts, and interviews that accompany the chapters. More nuance would have enhanced some of the characters, such as African Joe, who is as much the butt of jokes as he is the sidekick Mercy needs. Momentum builds rapidly as the plot to get the Necronomicon unfolds, but then it sags in the thick of a melee, including more characters than can be kept track of. Despite this, the well-crafted novel comes to a satisfying conclusion, with Mercy more developed than when readers first encounter her.
An imaginative back story and a rollicking plot make this an entertaining addition to the genre of occult fiction.Pub Date: April 29, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cornerstone Media
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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