Slow-moving, but emotionally charged.
Sequel to Marillier’s Wolfskin (2000), following the children of the previous novel’s main characters.
Thorvald, brought up by his widowed mother Margaret in the Orkneys, learns that his father is Somerled, an exiled murderer. Suddenly, his place in the half-Norse, half-Celtic community is in question; he decides to learn the truth about himself by going in quest of Somerled. He enlists the aid of Sam, a fisherman friend who owns Sea Dove, a well-built fishing boat. The two are joined by a stowaway: Creidhe, a young girl whose father was Somerled’s blood brother before the crime that led to his exile. After they are all but wrecked on a wild group of islands beyond the edge of the known world, they find a tribe led by Asgrim, a man of about the right age to be Thorvald’s father. Creidhe is immediately segregated, housed with the tribe’s women, and made to cover her hair. The two young men, needing to buy material to repair their boat, go off with the tribe’s men, who are preparing for a hunt—or perhaps a battle—on a nearby island. Disturbing revelations follow. Creidhe learns that the islanders’ children are being attacked, immediately after birth, by foreign spirits that kill them within a day. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Asgrim’s son has gone into exile after kidnapping the Seal People’s prophet, the Foxmask, thus bringing down their curse on the tribe’s children. Asgrim has called the hunt in order to capture Foxmask, return him to the Seal People, and end the curse. Believing that Asgrim is his lost father, and hoping to win his approval, Thorvald decides to help the clumsy islanders prepare for the hunt. When Creidhe learns what the islanders have planned for her, she attempts to escape them, setting off a conflict that seems doomed to end in tragedy.
Slow-moving, but emotionally charged.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30674-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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