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: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pulpy, peek-between-your-fingers look at small-town America, powered by real grief.
Three emotionally fragile college students head into the Appalachian wilderness to film a class project about roadside memorials.
Despite some fairly purposeful Blair Witch Project vibes and an atmosphere positively seething with menace, this slice of hillbilly horror has trouble sticking the landing. It’s a good premise, bordering on cliche: three students at Pennsylvania’s York College are teamed up in May 1983 by their eclectic American Studies professor Marcus Tyree to explore a topic of their choice related to American society. Our narrator is Billy Anderson, 19, an orphan traumatized by the death of his parents in a tragic accident, leaving him to be raised by his doting Aunt Helen. Troy Carpenter is curious but anxious, rattled by the death of his little brother in a drive-by shooting. Melody Wise is the oldest of the trio at 23, but is still reeling from the death of her mother. Their collective project is “Roadside Memorials: A Study of Grief and Remembrance,” a documentary for which the students plan to investigate these memorials and interview survivors, starting with Billy’s parents and their memorial in Sudbury, Pennsylvania. Other than an abundance of accidents, their subjects seem ordinary but the omens and totems that start appearing are anything but. Among these are an ominous hitchhiker, a flat tire, a dead animal, and a common symbol appearing on each memorial—all escalating events that lead to bloody and unexpected consequences. At first, the setup seems a little Scooby-Doo, replete with small-town secrets, concealed identities, and the odd unmasking. Our three leads are very likeable, but their bickering can lean towards the soap-operatic. Thankfully, Chizmar, a veteran at writing pedestrian horror in the vein of his occasional co-author Stephen King, gives the story enough of a whiff of the otherworldly, complete with an evil cult, to keep readers on edge before some late-stage twists strain the book’s hard-won authenticity.
A pulpy, peek-between-your-fingers look at small-town America, powered by real grief.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781668009192
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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
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