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THE HEAP

Name: THE HEAP
Author: Sean Adams
ISBN: 978-0-06-295773-3

by Sean Adams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2020

A vision of the future that gives the working class a chance to get even.

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When the largest and most audacious housing project in history crashes to the ground, a new culture is born, for good or bad.

Adams’ debut novel is a dystopian nightmare that is metaphorical in nature but has a compelling story, a recognizable villain, and a few key characters whose personality traits make them interesting. The setting is Los Verticalés, a nearly 500-story architectural marvel of its time; or, to be more accurate, what’s left of it after the unprecedented housing complex crashed to the ground under its own weight. What the salvage crew unaffectionately calls “the Heap” is nothing but an enormous pile of rubble punctuated by the occasional dead guy. Weirdly, there’s a single survivor: DJ Bernard Anders, who mysteriously still has electricity and broadcasts regularly to a wide audience from somewhere in the rubble. Meanwhile, interstitial excerpts from a history of "the Vert" titled The Later Years give context to the monolith’s rise and fall. The novel’s story centers on the “Dig Hands,” the poor souls recruited to shovel their way through the biggest recycling project in the world. The link to Bernard is his brother, Orville, digging relentlessly and carrying on nightly conversations with his brother over the radio. Orville’s companions include Hans, the photographer who emotionally captures his subject, and Lydia, who is trying to work her way up the community’s political structure. There are a couple of bad guys here—Hal Cornish, from the company that runs the radio station, wants Orville to converse with his trapped brother for the highest ratings, at any cost, while Peter Thisbee, the mogul who built the Vert in the first place, plays at redemption while working his own machinations to profit off his fallen monolith. It’s distressing that we have so many bleak visions of the future these days but at least here people are given a chance to dig themselves out of the hole that the upper class made.

A vision of the future that gives the working class a chance to get even.

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-295773-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BLOG
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books (and Stories) to Read in January

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.