An offbeat, strangely satisfying adventure through a land full of (literal) ghosts.
Rosson (The Mercy of the Tide, 2017) presents a surreal road novel about misfits on a journey to Southern California.
Mike Vale is a Portland, Oregon–based artist who once sold his paintings for incredible sums before his career and personal life took nose dives. Now he’s a raging alcoholic who hasn’t painted in years. He has a job at a fast-food restaurant but gets fired for assaulting a customer. Then Mike finds out that his ex-wife has died suddenly of an apparent brain hemorrhage, and he vows to make it to Los Angeles for the funeral, through hell or high water. Mike sells the last painting he can, secures a used 1998 Chrysler minivan, and hits the road. On his way south, he picks up a one-eyed record-store owner named Marvin Deitz who insists that he’s the reincarnation of Geoffroy Thérage, the executioner responsible for lighting the pyre that killed Joan of Arc. Later, he picks up a young man, aptly named Casper, who wants to create a reality show about ghosts. The kicker is that ghosts—sometimes referred to as “smokes”—have been appearing all over, particularly in California; their sudden appearances have caused traffic accidents and other problems, so they’re monitored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What will befall the heroes as they venture to LA under such circumstances? Rosson tells a tale of peculiar men living in a peculiar time, and the narrative easily moves them along their way. The author weaves events from Mike’s and Marvin’s pasts into the story to create a truly strange, though never unbelievable, journey. The very different backgrounds of the men in the van also allow for comedy, as when Mike attempts to explain why Casper’s T-shirt’s image of a bald eagle driving a truck and holding a beer is “ironic.” Rosson provides potent descriptions, such as of police lights that are “robbed of their power in the light of day.” Although the novel’s conclusion may reek of Hollywood-style happiness, the destination is secondary to the journey.
An offbeat, strangely satisfying adventure through a land full of (literal) ghosts.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946154-16-3
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Meerkat Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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