This amusing adventure delivers an enjoyable romp through a bizarre yet familiar landscape.
A debut absurdist novel parodies The Twilight Zone.
The year is 1962. A man in a skinny tie named Ron Sterling is in the Port Authority bus station in Manhattan. Ron is buying a ticket for Binghamton, New York, otherwise known as the “Fifth Most Depressing City in The Country.” Ron Sterling bears a striking similarity to Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone, right down to the Chesterfield he’s smoking. But Ron hosts something called The Detour Dimension. Things seem normal enough until it turns out the bus driver is a “Hot Dog Man” named Frank Weener. When Frank is not driving a bus, he is writing, and he hands a spiral notebook to Ron. Readers are introduced, via Frank’s writings, to The Anarchists. The group, with names like The Crazy Clown, Mr. Dude, and Larry Lutz, is seated at The Pancake House. The members of this crew discuss what they have been up to lately. The Crazy Clown, for instance, plans to park an M41 Walker Bulldog tank in front of a bank and sell Communist-themed ice cream. How does he manage to keep the ice cream cold? He explains to a questioning policeman he does so with “Cold War tactics.” The novel goes back and forth between such outrageous actions, both in Frank’s writing and on Ron’s journey. Mr. Dude teaches a poetry class, though he mainly has his students pretend to be him and take turns overseeing the proceedings. Then there’s action back at The Pancake House, where weird things happen. During a football game, “the Worcester sauce bottle in the middle of their table picks up nothing but John Madden and Pat Summerall.”
When readers first meet Ron and Frank, things are perplexing. While anyone familiar with Rod Serling’s work can easily imagine what Ron must look and sound like, what exactly is a Hot Dog Man and how does he manage to function like a human? In addition, it’s easy to be confused by The Anarchists, who are also called “comedians.” By the time The Crazy Clown talks about his tank, it’s clear that anything may transpire, with or without a satisfactory explanation. Nevertheless, once this tone is established, there is a great deal of humor to be found. In Mr. Dude’s poetry class, one student named Claude Spectrum puts on a drum machine and repeats the word Carbohydrates over and over again. The narrator later informs readers that “Spectrum’s deceptively simple lyric, stapled to an irresistibly militant rhythm…is ridiculously rich with allegorical, elliptical, empirical and erotic suggestion.” It’s a funny scene followed by a hilarious explanation. It’s also exactly the type of thing that might happen on The Twilight Zone if the episode were written by an insane part-human, part-hot dog bus driver. Keay’s book manages such playfulness without the sort of cruel mockery that sometimes surfaces in parodies. As zany as the scenes get, they maintain the feel of a tasteful homage. While not every bit lands as neatly as a Worcester sauce bottle that picks up football commentary, the novel never lets up on the fun.
This amusing adventure delivers an enjoyable romp through a bizarre yet familiar landscape.Pub Date: May 27, 2024
ISBN: 9798350944549
Page Count: 100
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”
A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.
Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316258876
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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