A complex, bonkers, and bracing conspiracy tale for adventurous readers.
A thriller set in 1991 focuses on the director of a mental hospital.
Say his name: Heimdallr. From Albania and lower Bavaria to upstate New York, the site of a mental hospital, this densely plotted novel is all over the map and resists an easy synopsis (but in a good way). In Albania, a beautiful widow defies attempts to compel her to become a sex worker for a better lifestyle. A Canadian mining director with suspect intentions hires her as a translator. Things go south quickly, leading readers to Birger Wallenberg, the recently hired director of the Asgard Park Institute for the Criminally Insane. En route by plane, he has a dream of using a remote probe that allows its user to access a psychotherapist’s patient’s mind and to experience what the person sees, feels, and thinks. In his dream, he enters a distant host, a woman who at that moment is flushing down a toilet $10 million worth of crack cocaine that a crime kingpin wants back, instigating the first crisis of Wallenberg’s directorship. In the real world, a schizophrenic from the institute escapes and murders two assailants sent to menace the woman, who’s a well-known scientist, and her 6-year-old daughter. And then things take a mythic turn: Wallenberg meets the institute’s former director, who warns him: “I brought you to Asgard Park for a purpose that is not to your liking.” Meaning Wallenberg must become “the chosen watchman; the vessel of Heimdallr, the god in Nordic mythology credited with social order on Earth.” Simonar has crafted a true What the Heck narrative that expands to include Burton Crane, “a roving troubleshooter,” investigating growing suspicions of “a secret empire out there…the world’s greatest conspiracy to defraud humankind.” The ambitious book is divided into four parts, and it can be easy to lose the thread as the story jumps to new perspectives. But patient and attentive readers will be rewarded when the intriguing strands come together. What keeps the pages turning is best summed up by one character’s declaration: “Wonders never cease at Asgard Park.”
A complex, bonkers, and bracing conspiracy tale for adventurous readers.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-91-987629-0-7
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Eventhor Media
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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