Totally uninspired—a missed opportunity to explore H.P. Lovecraft in even greater depths of interactive madness. (Requires...
A disappointingly bland and feature-poor rendering of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic short story about a great and terrible creature slumbering deep beneath the ocean floor.
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” For decades, those ominous and enigmatic words have instilled awe and anxiety in the frightened hearts of readers the world over. Sadly, there’s nothing in this marginally interactive and even buggy retelling of the horror-filled yarn that is likely to rouse old tentacle-puss from his noxious beauty sleep. Things start out rather promisingly, as readers must manipulate stacks of old boxes and crates obscuring the text in an action that closely mirrors events taking place in the unsettling first-person narrative. That simple but useful interactive device effectively manages to inject readers into Lovecraft’s unsteady dreamscape. However, as propitious as the feature may be, its promise is never fully realized, almost immediately sliding into mere gimmickry before being abandoned altogether. Additional objects thinly associated with the discovery of a secret worldwide cult dedicated to worshiping the mind-bending being known as Cthulhu appear on subsequent pages, but they have little direction or purpose. What’s more, the opportunity for Lovecraft devotees to actually “handle” and closely inspect the grotesque bas-relief of the mighty Cthulhu sitting upon his pedestal would alone seem to be worth the price of admission. But H.P.’s fans don’t get that opportunity here. Instead, they are limited to “picking up” (and perhaps flinging around) a vague, two-dimensional representation of the frightful figurine lying at the blackened heart of this time-honored and twisted tale. Even the app’s simple page-turning animation functions sluggishly, requires repeated screen swipes to work and prompts lots more frustration than tactile satisfaction. An accompanying soundtrack meant to enhance the otherwise tepidness of the overall experience also fails to operate properly.
Totally uninspired—a missed opportunity to explore H.P. Lovecraft in even greater depths of interactive madness. (Requires iOS 7 and above.)Pub Date: March 3, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Felix Luis Campos Granados
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2014
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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