A blood-soaked freakout that does for gas stations what Jaws did for beaches.
A metalhead bassist’s will to live is tested at an eerie rest stop in the middle of the night, in Cassidy’s horror novella.
Abe is a slightly insecure, nebbishy musician, who plays bass guitar and sings for an obscure death-metal band. When his grandmother Bobbe has a stroke, he decides to schedule a practice with his band miles away so they can get some rehearsal time in before an upcoming gig and he can be by Bobbe’s side in the hospital. He pulls into a rest stop on the way but discovers that—despite seeing a few cars in the parking lot—the entire place is empty. Alarm bells go off, but he needs to use the bathroom. When he tries to leave the bathroom, he discovers that the door’s been jammed…or locked. When creatures start emerging from the air vent in the ceiling—including a large hairy spider, writhing insects, and more—he soon realizes that something foul is at play; there was a reason the rest stop was empty, and he will have to struggle to make it out of the bathroom alive. Cassidy’s tense, heart-pounding thriller moves easily from the freaky to the gory. (Ominous notes, with letters clipped from candy wrappers, are slipped under the door, making the mundane feel nightmarish.) The author’s prose is brisk, clean, sometimes funny, sometimes earnest, and often memorably horrifying (a surface of “[f]athomless, black holes, honeycombed in row upon row across what should be [a] stranger’s face” stands out as a particularly unsettling description). There are moments when Cassidy tries to make the horror cut deeper by evoking the intergenerational violence and antisemitism Bobbe once faced; these elements aren’t as developed or integrated into the rest of the story as they should be. The novella works best when it simply layers fright after fright, trapping the reader in a gnarly bathroom with creepy crawlies coming in and a possible serial killer on the other side of the door.
A blood-soaked freakout that does for gas stations what Jaws did for beaches.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781959565369
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Shortwave Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
It's almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.
A disturbing household secret has far-reaching consequences in this dark, unusual ghost story.
Mallory Quinn, fresh out of rehab and recovering from a recent tragedy, has taken a job as a nanny for an affluent couple living in the upscale suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey, when a series of strange events start to make her (and her employers) question her own sanity. Teddy, the precocious and shy 5-year-old boy she's charged with watching, seems to be haunted by a ghost who channels his body to draw pictures that are far too complex and well formed for such a young child. At first, these drawings are rather typical: rabbits, hot air balloons, trees. But then the illustrations take a dark turn, showcasing the details of a gruesome murder; the inclusion of the drawings, which start out as stick figures and grow increasingly more disturbing and sophisticated, brings the reader right into the story. With the help of an attractive young gardener and a psychic neighbor and using only the drawings as clues, Mallory must solve the mystery of the house's grizzly past before it's too late. Rekulak does a great job with character development: Mallory, who narrates in the first person, has an engaging voice; the Maxwells' slightly overbearing parenting style and passive-aggressive quips feel very familiar; and Teddy is so three-dimensional that he sometimes feels like a real child.
It's almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-81934-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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