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
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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