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
Jewell is absolutely a genius at building suspense, but the “man behaving badly” plot is getting tired.
Following her father’s sudden death, Aisling Swann is secretly horrified when her mother begins to date again—and she quickly becomes suspicious of this new flame.
Four years ago: A mysterious male narrator reflects upon his relationship with his wife—along with a few pointed comments about how she is aging. It quickly becomes apparent that this self-proclaimed “very pleasant” man is not who he seems; he already has a girlfriend on the side, and he’s playing both women with sob stories about his job and his traumatic past while taking money from them. Even as they get more and more frustrated with his lack of communication during ever-lengthening absences, he still gives them what they want: “a top-notch husband.” In the present day, Ash Swann; her brother, Arlo; and their mother, Nina, mourn the loss of her charismatic father, Paddy, a successful chef with a chain of lucrative restaurants. Nina receives a sympathy note from a man who claims to have worked closely with Paddy in the industry, which leads to a robust online flirtation that moves into the real world about a year after her husband’s death. Ash is living at home, mired in grief as well as her own mental health struggles, and she’s none too happy to see her mom dating—but particularly this handsome, egregiously suave Nick Radcliffe. Ash begins to notice some inconsistencies with his stories and his past, so she enlists Paddy’s ex-girlfriend Jane to help her investigate. Meanwhile, Ash’s story continues to intercut that of the mysterious man who is now married to his former girlfriend—and still up to his old tricks. Jewell’s cutting between past and present certainly allows revelations to ooze out at a slow, controlled pace; even as the reader makes obvious connections, the full picture remains obscure. Jewell has written some incredibly engaging and strong female characters, Nina, Ash, and Jane foremost among them. What would it have been like to split the narrative between them instead of giving so much voice—and thus narrative power—to the male antagonist?
Jewell is absolutely a genius at building suspense, but the “man behaving badly” plot is getting tired.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9781668033876
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
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