And never mind the loose ends: there’s another volume on the way, and we look forward to it.
What lies on the other side of the beyond? Does The Shadow know? Certainly the Invisible Man does, and therein lies a knot in Palma’s (The Map of the Sky, 2012, etc.) newest delightful puzzler.
Said unseeable person comes into the picture courtesy of H.G. Wells, with whom Palma’s tale opens. Wells is an unflappable model of Victorian Englishness, convinced that “his was the most significant generation to have walked the Earth” inasmuch as—among other things—it possessed the seeds of the knowledge required to end life on the planet. Rational and resolute, Wells must grapple with the unfolding reality that there’s a whole irrational, surreal, irresolute world out there, some of it of his own creation. Palma is happy, it seems, with the idea that writers are pretty significant people at that: in the panoply of heroes he enlists to the cause of humankind’s salvation are Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll. Then there’s fearless vampire/werewolf/villain hunter Cornelius Clayton, never too busy to appreciate “proud breasts” and baronial manses and for whom things can never get quite weird enough, and his own army of allies, confidants, and informants, including a friendly proto-shrink who helpfully says, “If I devoted myself to treating stupid people I would have a full practice, and I would be a wealthy man.” Palma’s principal players are anything but stupid, but they do have a way of finding themselves in supernatural jams. His shaggy doggish, steampunk-y tale, with many moving parts, threatens to spin off disconnectedly at any moment, but somehow he keeps things straight (and straight-faced, though he is often very dryly funny); in the end it all coheres, however improbable the story he conjures. Though sometimes talky and sometimes didactic (“But more importantly, he was afraid that if he continued writing Sherlock Holmes adventures, his readers would identify him with what he considered not his best writing”), Palma’s yarn is altogether a satisfying, thoroughly entertaining creature feature.
And never mind the loose ends: there’s another volume on the way, and we look forward to it.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8818-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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