Critical of much in the modern world and hardly subtle, this post-apocalyptic tale offers plenty of fury and angst.
A moralistic debut novel focuses on disparate characters caught in a bleak landscape.
As the narrator explains at the outset of his journey, “I wandered blindly and aimlessly through the darkness, often having to pause to cough the dust out of my lungs.” What exactly is causing the darkness or the dust is unclear, although the narrator soon discovers that he is not alone in surroundings that can best be described as post-apocalyptic. Among the “skeletons of decimated buildings” and “charred shells of cars strewn at random like dead leaves” are people with stories to tell. Given the environment in which they are placed, it comes as no surprise that their tales are not happy ones. Take David Steele, a once successful pastor who worked his way up from humble beginnings to become an accomplished author and leader of his own megachurch. After becoming involved in a homosexual relationship, he finds that his accomplishments seem to vanish before his eyes. Then there is an unnamed adolescent whose “voice trembled with pure hatred.” Telling the story of his violent activities with a group of neo-Nazis, the youth details days filled with beer and propaganda that end with him alone, with a gun, in a desert. What the narrator will gather from these accounts remains mysterious, though they all seem to point in one way or another toward God. Working in the tradition of Dante, the author forces the reader to examine the lives of the fallen, whether they happen to be a professional athlete or a young woman in the throes of Los Angeles excitement. The stories of these lives tend to be lengthy, blunt, and incorporated with gems of wisdom. Though the California girl has a lot of clichéd experiences, such as visiting a reality TV star’s home that is “fucking huge, but really tacky,” she is nevertheless able to say quite succinctly: “You know, people always say that kids grow up too fast nowadays. But it seems to me like so many people in this country never grow up at all.” At nearly 1,000 pages, portions prove to be drawn out, but the overall senses of passion and urgency never waver.
Critical of much in the modern world and hardly subtle, this post-apocalyptic tale offers plenty of fury and angst.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 800
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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