Knausgaard at his darkest, and most sluggish.
A photography student strikes a deal with, perhaps, the Devil.
Knausgaard’s acclaimed six-volume autofiction epic, My Struggle (2012-2018), inevitably drew accusations of extreme narcissism for the author. But the Karl Ove character conjured up in those books was defined by his ordinariness; this bleak, somewhat overstuffed novel truly is a portrait of self-absorption. Kristian Hadeland is an aspiring art photographer who, in 1985, has left his native Norway to study in London. Disdainful of his teachers’ criticism of his work, he decides to cut his own path, often in troubling ways; for instance, he attempts to boil a dead cat down to its bones in his apartment for the sake of a vague photo project. After cutting off contact with his parents in a fit of pique, his sole friend is Hans, a mysterious Dutch expat working as a stage designer for a production of Doctor Faustus. And this novel is essentially the Faust tale with a modern spin, following Kristian’s path after the Mephistophelian Hans befriends him, pivoting on an altercation between Kristian and a homeless man who dies after they tussle over a cigarette lighter. Hans has pulled some levers to help Kristian escape a manslaughter charge, freeing him to pursue photo-world glory. But at what cost? Many familiar Knausgaardian elements are at play here: Granular explorations of youth and art-making, philosophizing on religion, a scatological detour. But the author is more concerned with ethics than in his previous books, and this novel is overly bulky for the kind of straightforward morality play it imagines. It also asks the reader to spend a lot of time with a profoundly unlikeable young Kristian, who repetitively bemoans how every career opportunity is beneath him and that family and women are drags on artistic greatness. As in the Faust story, comeuppance arrives, but it takes a while.
Knausgaard at his darkest, and most sluggish.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593832806
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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