A darkly delectable, fresh blend of horror and Finnish myth.
Grass’ audacious mix of dark fantasy, horror, apocalyptic fiction, and Finnish folklore pits a lost boy against a mythic goddess of death who is trying to remake the world in her dark vision.
Fifteen-year-old Alan and his mother, Lena, disappeared in a plane crash off the coast of Helsinki and were presumed dead. But 20 years later, when a “massive, inked savage” inexplicably appears after an explosion creates a crater in a petroleum refinery outside of Philadelphia, the amnesiac giant eventually remembers that his name is Alan—and that for the last two decades he has been wandering in a place called Tuonela, a purgatorial realm of the dead in Finnish mythology, where he has had to survive a never-ending onslaught of hellish creatures bent on his annihilation. Covered with ritualistic hammer tattoos and 7 feet tall, Alan is brought to the home of his affluent aunt by Jefferson O’Brady, a Philadelphia homicide detective who is a walking cliché—the proverbial overworked, alcoholic cop with no significant relationships who numbs himself daily to forget the horrors that he has seen. But as Alan attempts to reconnect with his aunt and his next-door neighbor Rebecca—who used to be his childhood best friend—O’Brady is tasked with finding a prolific serial killer who is terrifying the inhabitants of Philadelphia. As O’Brady finds tangential connections between the serial killer’s crime scenes and the strange arrival of Alan, the murders begin to increase, and soon the body count is in the hundreds. As an otherworldly terror blankets the city, Alan sets off on his own quest—to go back to Helsinki, locate his mother, and somehow figure out his role in the interdimensional conflict.
In this genre hybrid—which seamlessly fuses elements of horror, police procedural, and mythology—the sheer uniqueness of the storyline is an obvious strength. Readers will be kept off balance throughout, and the numerous plot twists make for a satisfyingly unpredictable read. Additionally, Grass, whose previous novel was Dreck (2021), ably creates layered, emotionally astute characters. Alan and O’Brady are deeply and insightfully portrayed, and so are numerous secondary characters, like Alan’s aunt Mimi, his friend Rebecca, and Christian Henneman, a cultist who is fittingly described as “a cross between Ra’s-al-Ghul and Tony Robbins.” Along with the genre elements and bombshell-laden storyline, the richly described worldbuilding helps create a wildly immersive read. The various interdimensional worlds, and their nightmarish creatures, come alive on the page: “The biggest swarm were eyeless, humanoid devils with double-joints, obsidian black skin and long tongues slithering out past needlepoint teeth; their wings stretched from their waists up to their deformed wrists, odd-angled bones jutting out like compound fractures.” An excerpt from the novel perfectly describes the reading experience: “A bloody feast. A bountiful cornucopia of carnage, to be relished, to soak in.”
A darkly delectable, fresh blend of horror and Finnish myth.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73588-854-5
Page Count: 618
Publisher: Dickinson Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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