Tales that, at their best, call to mind the work of Stephen King, O. Henry, and Edgar Allan Poe.
In Fulcher’s multigenre short-story collection, various characters reach moments of psychological—and, in a few cases, physical—disassembly.
Although these stories largely don’t fall neatly into categories, almost all share significant characteristics. Their main characters, overall, aren’t sympathetic; they can be sexual predators, murderers, or thieves, brought to the brink of their own unmaking. Or else they are, as in a tale of a baker who must face a dragon, singularly unprepared for their crucial moment. In the titular story, a fugitive rapist is haunted by his most recent victim and another ghost from his past. In “Drawing the Ace,” an airline passenger loses consciousness during turbulence and awakens as the long-dead partner of the old war veteran seated next to him, flying their last sortie against a German fighter plane. In "Retribution,” a drug dealer takes a tumble, and when he wakes up his former customers are reaching out for him—the dead ones. In the middle of the collection stands “Porch Talk,” the only thematic outlier; it’s a nice moment to pause, as the young man and his grandfather do, before the collection’s chaos begins anew. None of what comes before quite delivers like “The Shamblers,” which opens with “The kids where I grew up didn’t scare too easy.” As with other stories, an awful character—in this case, a preteen who, with his friends, likes picking on their oldest neighbors, the “shamblers”—falls asleep or hits another liminal hinge, and the world changes. However, this work effectively dips into a terrible space where “the dream that didn’t feel so good,” and turns out to be a strange reality. Readers who are willing to pick up a collection for a single fully realized story will find it here, and four others approach its sharp, edge-of-your-seat appeal. Overall, this book creates an environment in which a simple sentence such as “It was just Mom standing there in the open closet” can be the scariest words one has read in a while.
Tales that, at their best, call to mind the work of Stephen King, O. Henry, and Edgar Allan Poe.Pub Date: March 23, 2011
ISBN: 9781456727062
Page Count: 80
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2023
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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