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.Ī tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Ī tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. “Why are these people trying to teach the world about Taoscal magic?” The answers to this question, and many others, will be found by the diligent-and patient-reader, somewhere within the sprawling, infuriating pages of Black Oxen.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. ”) and by subtly placed allusions to Patrick White’s utterly mad novel of hermaphroditism and psychic transference, The Twyborn Affair. Nevertheless, clues are provided by Knox’s brilliantly chosen title (from Yeats’s line “The years like great black oxen tread the world. Reading this cheerfully overstuffed novel is rather like watching an insanely lavish “epic” film in which dozens of actors play vividly imagined eccentrics: the spectacle is rousing, but the brain-weary viewer despairs of connecting logically together everything that keeps flying past him. ![]() ![]() The restlessness and volatility of Knox’s characters find objective correlatives in the complex aftereffects of Lequama’s bloody revolution (especially as experienced by its Taoscal ethnic majority, as rebel forces rise to and falls from power), and in the tangled interrelations of a cast of nearly 50 important characters, including an ostensibly reformed prostitute and her rebellious daughter, a bisexual male military hero and an Amazonian woman officer, a martyred poet, a morose Newfoundland dog, and a desiccated billionaire who schemes to live forever. The charismatic Abra fathers a daughter, whose later life is chronicled in reports of her therapy sessions and in scenes set (out of chronological order) in Eden, the fictional South American republic of Lequama, and a southern California campus. ![]() An extended flashback takes us to Eden (doubtless in new Zealand), where a foundling who’s autistic, or a genius, or both (“something between feral child and street kid”) is adopted by bachelor loner Carlin Cadaver. In 2022, medical therapist Carme Risk is herself undergoing “narrative therapy,” attempting to comprehend the mysterious figure of her father, an apparently ageless and possibly supernatural being known variously as Abra Cadaver, “Ido Idea,” and Walter Risk. Byzantine intrigue and melodramatic excess abound to an almost unprecedented degree in this fascinating, inordinately busy new novel from the New Zealand author ( The Vintner’s Luck, 1999).īrief summary won’t help much, but here goes.
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