An ambitious plot that fails to cohere into either insight or revelation.
Troubled 22-year-old Emma Powers lands in the middle of a mystery bigger than her own actions when she meets Earl, a feral boy living seemingly alone in the Black Hills of South Dakota, who hides his face behind an elaborate tinfoil mask.
Emma is on the run. Her destination is the Badlands, where she hopes to uphold her end of the suicide pact she made with her stepbrother, Ray. In addition to her filthy Doc Martens and despised “set of double Ds,” she’s carrying with her the baggage of her and Ray’s obsessive relationship, her complicity in his death, the emotional scars of her father’s childhood abandonment, a surgical wound from her recent emergency hysterectomy, and the seeds of a cancer she refuses to treat. She also has a hearty addiction to Vicodin, and, under its fuzzy influence, she hitches a ride with Lowell, a “white dude who thinks tribal tattoos are a grand idea,” who is on his way to kidnap his young daughter and take her to the West Coast. When Lowell’s generally creepy vibe tips over into sexual violence, Emma shoots him and steals his van, leaving him to freeze in the impending blizzard. In search of gas, Emma pulls off at an abandoned diner, and there she meets Earl, an approximately 8-year-old boy who hides behind a tinfoil mask. As Emma struggles to get back on the road, Earl draws her further and further into the secrets that abound in his dark life. We meet George, Earl’s abusive father, whom Earl has attempted to poison with a stolen bottle of Emma’s pills, and learn what exactly is in the cellar Earl would like Emma to throw George into. As the extent of George’s abuse becomes clear, Emma decides to take Earl with her, though she is unclear where her own journey will end—but George and a vengeful Lowell have other plans for them both. Marked by fire and ice, Moulton’s debut insists on upping its ante at every turn. The result is a preponderance of conflagrations that consume not only the ready tinder of the abandoned ghost town Earl calls home, but also all semblance of rational character-building. In spite of the intricate rendering of this cold and remote landscape, the story itself feels false and vague, more like smoke than fire.
An ambitious plot that fails to cohere into either insight or revelation.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-53830-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
