An earthquake in Mammoth View is just the beginning. Once the explosions hit, the town’s in a full-scale panic. Billy Lane and cohorts Jackson and Sam use these as diversions to rob the local bank, but a traffic jam impedes their getaway. They turn around and head up the mountain, passing through a summer running camp for girls. Billy’s teenage daughter Tori is there, but when she returns from a hot-spring dip, her fellow runners and coaches are gone. Back in Mammoth View, notorious hellion brothers Melvin and Gordon Johnson are taking advantage of the seemingly deserted town, grabbing food or whatever abandoned goods they can find. Police chief Kenneth Hicks believes the brothers are responsible for the bank robbery, not to mention the corresponding bodies. They’ve definitely kidnapped someone, as Hicks and Lt. Johnny Lloyd soon discover, and only get more desperate and dangerous when they realize the cops are after them. Tori and radio DJ Oscar Alphonse “King” Desario may be potential abductees, for leverage or something worse. The moody story benefits from its atmospheric setting. What exactly sparked an apparent evacuation, for example, isn’t fully revealed until the end. There are hints of possible causes—someone suggests a Russian invasion or perhaps aliens—all shrouded with an undercurrent of sheer creepiness, like an initially unexplained “blob” following girls at the camp. Solidly developed characters add to the tension, people either wanting to escape their past or hopelessly locked inside it. Billy, for one, longs for the days with Becky, his partner (now dead) in both crime and love and Tori’s mom, while King’s girlfriend, Janice, is itching to flee Mammoth View—and maybe the DJ as well. Various players cross paths in intriguing, sometimes amusing ways (Janice in nearby Stockton meets someone readers will recognize), and most find their ways, reluctantly or not, back to Mammoth View.
Bursting with vigor and electrified characters and with an ending the author stamps with a knowing wink.
This impressive debut novel chronicles the making of a shlock-schock movie in a South American jungle imbued with all-too-real late-20th-century horrors.
One would have to be a pretty desperate actor to pursue a movie role like the one our nameless young protagonist, referred to throughout in the second person, snatches like an overripe, low-hanging mango sometime in 1979. Leaving his bewildered girlfriend behind in New York, this actor hops a plane to Colombia as a last-minute lead replacement in a jungle cannibalism chiller being slapped together by an enigmatic Italian filmmaker named Ugo Velluto, who's inflamed with the idea of making something more authentically scary than usual. And real life seems to be cooperating with Ugo’s obsession: near an Amazonian shooting locale so remote that it doesn’t have a phone line, there's a cadre of revolutionary guerillas who have entered a Faustian bargain with international drug traffickers. Some of this off-screen nastiness begins to gradually overlap with the graphic grossness being orchestrated by Ugo and his crew. Meanwhile, the actor struggles to find his way—and his character—in a project that's without a script and, seemingly, without clear direction beyond whatever comes to its increasingly erratic director’s mind. Inspired by actual events, Wilson shows impressive command of a narrative that weaves back and forth and back again in both time and locale; much like the viewer of a pseudo-documentary horror movie (ever seen The Blair Witch Project?), you wonder throughout whether you should trust whatever it is you’re told—and jumping to the end won’t help at all. You shouldn’t anyway, because Wilson’s writing style is hypnotic, tightly wound, and harrowingly evocative of the story’s stifling, bug-heavy atmosphere. Even the sunniest skies of this ill-starred shoot are thick with menace and portent.
Keep telling yourself, "It's only a novel, it's only a novel" ... except an author's note at the end says it's inspired by actual events.
Did you know that by the time signals from one of the 8,000 satellites circling the Earth reach the planet, they carry only a tenth of the energy of a Christmas-tree light? Well, Morrison, who’s got lots of insider dope about financial markets to share as well, does know, and he sees no reason why a tiny cadre of terrorists shouldn’t tamper with an unrelated satellite to put the hex on its signals in pleasingly disastrous ways. Before he can get to this payoff, though, he laboriously traces the circumstances that lead to the launch of the satellite dubbed Cody. Eternal Dutch graduate student Peter Van Weert, struck by the limited access of half the human race to meaningful computer access, dashes off an idea to his tutor about using municipal water pipes to bring broadband to everyone who’s thirsty. Entrepreneur Phillipe Timmermans soon gets wind of this idea and thinks there’s money in it. So do Lyrical CEO Aaron Cannondale, the world’s sixth-richest man, and his friend Terry Vaughn, the banking guru of Teestone Financial. Once big money gets involved, the new venture, which Peter calls Cheyenne, takes off like a rocket.
An Atlanta detective, hoping to explain his mistress’s fiery death, dives into a world rife with strange religious beliefs in Rothacker’s (The Pit, and No Other Stories, 2015, etc.) unconventional thriller.
A penetrating, provocative tale of a detective who psychoanalyzes as often as he investigates.
