A supernaturally effective oddity odyssey.
Walker’s novel charts the enigmatic disappearance of a prominent paranormal researcher and podcaster during a road trip visiting America’s most bizarre and mysterious landmarks.
In a New Mexico national park that serves as a New Age/occult-enthusiast destination, a bloodied, dazed man is found by a tour guide. The man’s backpack holds a strange scrapbook of printed transcripts, blogposts, e-mails, texts, short stories, old articles, and other miscellany that, arranged in rough chronological order, shape-shifts into a wild yarn spanning the summer of 2015. During an epidemic of suicides as more and more Americans just start giving up and becoming zombie-like unhoused people, paranormal podcaster and webmaster Kevin Starkly gathers long-standing friends and weirdness enthusiasts (the “Nerd Legion”) for a road trip visiting the nation’s landmarks linked to UFOs, ghosts, and monsters. In the New Jersey Pine Barrens (the domain of the legendary Jersey Devil), Kevin vanishes, surrounded by blue lights. Spurred by the urgency to solve Kevin’s disappearance (or simply playing along with his game), the remaining teammates and some satellite associates travel onward to an alien-abductee convention in Ohio’s Indian-mound country, the remnants of Nikola Tesla’s workshops, and an alleged 1897 crash (and burial) site of a “spaceman” in Aurora, Texas. Murder, menace, and bizarre occurrences proliferate in a fragmented plotline that is part Blair Witch Project and part Up the Down Staircase. The material speaks uncannily well to those familiar with late-night conspiracy radio and dubious volumes by Whitley Strieber—the narrative is a neat intertwining of fiction with actual Forteana lore (“I suggest a detour to the famous Mystery Hill here in North Salem, NH. Always some strange rituals taking place around here especially by the Sacrificial Table”). Walker pulls an amazing aggregation of borderline satire and surreal terror into a coherent and spooky whole; Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) occasionally springs to mind, which is no small praise.
A supernaturally effective oddity odyssey.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798350959277
Page Count: 340
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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