This artful literary exploration of evil’s manifestation makes for a sophisticated horror tale.
In Pyper’s (The Guardians, 2011, etc.) sixth novel, professor David Ullman’s marriage has imploded, his closest confidant has terminal cancer, and he’s been approached by a mysterious emaciated woman offering an all-expenses-paid first-class trip to Venice.
A renowned expert on Milton’s Paradise Lost, Ullman is a Columbia University professor. Acting on behalf of a nameless client, the Thin Woman, as Ullman calls her, asks him to observe a “phenomenon,” a thing she too has seen, but “there is no name for it I could give.” That evening Ullman’s wife tells him she’s leaving him for another man, and he decides to escape to Venice accompanied by his beloved daughter, Tess, “a smart, bookishly aloof girl,” who like him is plagued by melancholy. In Venice, Ullman confronts one of the devil’s Legion infecting an Italian professor’s body. Ullman panics. Before he can gather his wits, Tess apparently commits suicide. As she leaps to her death, Ullman hears from her, in that same devilish voice, a recitation from Milton’s epic. The action returns to New York City, Ullman confused, near-suicidal and haunted by the fear that all he has not believed may be real. “Screwing the lid off [his] imagination,” Ullman reads Tess’ diary and begins to think his daughter isn’t dead but instead in the clutches of the Unnamed, perhaps one of Pandemonium’s Stygian Council. Plagued by signs and omens, Ullman treks from North Dakota to Kansas to Florida to Ontario and back to New York. His confidant and friend, Elaine O’Brien, another professor, rides along in support. There are killings, possessions and philosophical speculations, with the pair shadowed by the Pursuer, perhaps an agent of Rome. Pyper is an intelligent writer, steeped in Miltonian symbolism, gifted with language, enough so that fans of the genre will shiver with cold sweat when the Stygian demon wanders out to bark, spit and hiss.
This artful literary exploration of evil’s manifestation makes for a sophisticated horror tale.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9741-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
IN THE NEWS
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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