It’s a marvel of postmodern storytelling and decidedly not for every taste. For the moment, suffice it to say that things...
“Look at it, Xanther, breathe it in, never forget: this is what you get when there is no law.” The saga continues, and Xanther’s happy world is cracking at the edges.
Experimentalist-plus-some Danielewski (Into the Forest, 2015, etc.) is one-ninth of the way into his 27-volume opus, The Familiar, and the chickens, if not felines, are beginning to come home to roost. Just barely adolescent, Xanther, the geeky but resourceful center of the piece, is beginning to feel stirrings of a psychic unease that in turn hints at untold powers of mind: when her dad, Anwar, hits a squirrel while out driving, she tries mightily to save it, then subjects herself to a kind of self-interrogation: “the Question Song re-announces itself now with everything about that little creature: how old was it? 432 days. was its mother still alive? No. its father? No. was it a he or a she. She was pregnant.” Xanther is just trying to live a normal life, what passes for normal life for her anyway, in a summer full of—yes—blooming honeysuckle and plenty of pain. That’s no easy task, that normality, in a world full of Islamic State group atrocities, Salvadoran street gangs, and chained alpha felines: “You always keep your hands between your face and the jaws….And you never say no to a lion.” Anwar, meanwhile, is worried sick, for being an eccentric polymath doesn’t pay the bills. Danielewski’s vision of the near-future is dystopian but not Blade Runner so: his world is pretty much like ours, save that not everyone speaks in ways that are easily comprehended, especially the faraway Asian players whose missing cat somehow tumbled into Xanther’s world in the first volume. Such a future requires all sorts of odd typographic conventions, drawings, and Go notations, natch, and Danielewski obliges until the reader’s head spins.
It’s a marvel of postmodern storytelling and decidedly not for every taste. For the moment, suffice it to say that things are looking dicey for Xanther and company.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-375-71498-6
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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