Ominous, masterfully conceived psychological fiction.
De Voe’s short story collection features characters in devilish conundrums.
The short fiction collected here offers a series of themes and plot twists that are delightfully odd, unexpected, and borderline macabre. In the subtly effective opener, “Shutter,” a protective ghost perched in a tree observes the park bench interactions between a young struggling female actor and an elder with menacingly predatory intentions. “Tastemakers,” with its embedded satire of artistic communities, depicts grisly performance art set in a museum where crowdsourcing-funded artists synchronize their suicides while “the spectators all gasp.” The theme of family recurs frequently; an old witch in “The Scissors of Hope and Despair” may or may not have dementia, like her cocky granddaughter believes, but a strategic and revealing game of chess offers proof positive. One of the book’s longer tales, “Mom of the Year,” also touches on family bonds when an outspoken, award-winning mother of six has her standards challenged during a live reality TV talk show. The Brooklyn mother featured in “Left Brain” struggles with raising a young son stricken with a condition that limits his communication to numbers. Increasingly panicked, she fears that “his right brain was slowly eating his left brain like a psychopathic sibling jealously encroaching on shared space.” The sheer number of revolving narrators distinguishes “A Rose” from the rest of the collection, with De Voe exercising her creative muscles in this fairy tale gone awry. Closing out the collection is the shortest entry, the bravura “Virgin Flight 244, Chicago to Heathrow,” which, with great economy, manages to convey the horror of a wife giving birth to a demon child while seated in trans-Atlantic coach seats with her husband. As the new dad deals with the devil spawn and its hemorrhaging mother, De Voe’s disarming talents are on full display. Each story demonstrates De Voe’s gift for creating characters and scenarios that are just off the beaten path. Fans of The Twilight Zoneare certain to be mesmerized by this eerie anthology, filled with surreal wonder, sinister scenes, and a cast of eerily memorable characters.
Ominous, masterfully conceived psychological fiction.Pub Date: April 10, 2023
ISBN: 979-8987926901
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Borda Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.
Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears.
The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King’s It (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it’s five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-née-Lauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they create a pact, the Covenant: “It’s how they’re there for each other. How they’ll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.” But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying “This place hates you,” among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There’s plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces—rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them—but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn’t as overtly gothic as Black River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: “We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.”
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593156568
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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