Dazzling revelation or self-indulgent folly? We report; you decide.
Bizarre attempt to simultaneously criticize, explicate and science fictionalize the odd, minor Jules Verne fantasy whose English title is usually given as Off on a Comet (1877).
In response to a summons, immature late 30-something Hector Servadac arrives in California and drives out to the desert ranch where his father, Hector Senior, has holed up with a flock of believers, apparently convinced that the world is about to end. Senior, Junior understands, has had a series of visions about an extraterrestrial object striking the Earth. During the night, an earthquake rattles the ranch; in the morning, thick fog prevails. Strangely, daylight lasts only three hours, followed by two hours of night, followed again by daylight. Senior explains that the object has smashed the Earth and stuck to the fragment they’re standing on. This section is narrated in the past tense. Junior doesn’t buy a word of it but finds himself physically unable to leave the ranch. He falls desperately in love with a Bulgarian woman, Dimmi, and is gnawed by jealousy when he finds out she’s sleeping with his father. Most of the survivors experience intensely personal visions; Junior’s involve past relationships with women and his parents. It begins to rain. A weird mossy growth covers the desert. Senior babbles about intelligence; others speculate that the moss is a manifestation of the object growing through and absorbing the fragment it has broken from the parent planet. This section is narrated in the present tense. Finally, as the fragment whirls away into space, Senior disappears, to be absorbed by the alien moss, and Junior experiences the future—narrated in the future tense—as a single, all-encompassing vision.
Dazzling revelation or self-indulgent folly? We report; you decide.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84416-490-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Solaris/BL Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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