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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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