The story is complicated, and it doesn’t always add up. When it does, though, it’s enough to make you put your fingers over...
Another atmospheric neogothic yarn, drenched in Scandinavian anxiety and lots of gore, by horror-meister Lindqvist (Handling the Undead, 2010, etc.).
Not overtly creepy at first, at least not in the spine-tingling way of Lindqvist’s debut, the great Let Me In (2007), this latest outing takes its time building up a head of steam—or, better, a head of extremely bad vibes. Lennart Cederström, folksinger, musicologist and amateur mycologist, is wandering about in a boreal forest looking for chanterelles, that being the sort of thing one does in a socialist paradise. He finds, instead, a small, shallow grave and inside it, “a baby girl, just a few days or weeks old.” Lennart rescues the baby, noting that her crying was like nothing his attentive ears had ever taken in—and pitched at a perfect E, “an E that rang like a bell and made the leaves quiver and the birds fly up from the trees.” You’ll be forgiven for wanting to tell Lennart, right now, to run away, since a baby so vocally equipped is likely to have other eldritch powers; but he does not run, and instead, he hides the baby away in the depths of his well-oiled and well-scrubbed apartment, where he lives with his dissatisfied, adulterous wife. They have a creepy kid already, but he’s been living away from home for years. “At some point during Jerry’s worst years, Lennart had wished his son dead,” Lindqvist writes, meaningfully. When the mayhem begins and the blood starts spurting, things do indeed move in fatal directions. But there’s more than mere mass murder in these pages; in between spasms of the supernatural, Lindqvist charts the parallel transformation of a lonely teenage girl whom Theres, now a singing sensation, has taken it upon herself to protect. Teenage angst, psychopathy, Eurovision and wild wolves: What more could you want?
The story is complicated, and it doesn’t always add up. When it does, though, it’s enough to make you put your fingers over your eyes. Good, spooky fun.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-62051-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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