Kira Jane Buxton is a master at describing the visual effects of whatever is happening. It is when ST sees that happening that he flies home to save Dennis the lop-eared bloodhound. Among other hideous things, humans begin to eat their heretofore beloved pets.
Yes, dear reader, it is a virus, and I can say it now, it is a pandemic. It is an apocalyptic tale filled with zombie-like humans in the process of losing their humanness due to a mysterious virus. ST, curiously human-like in his thinking, becomes increasingly more crow as the story unfolds. They mumble, they are almost unrecognizable. The streets are without traffic, and when he reaches Walmart, the employees are slobbering, with bobbing heads and poking their fingers and heads into anything that resembles a glass-like screen. One of ST’s first flights from his Craftsman home after Big Jim retreats to the basement is to go to Walmart in the hope of stealing some medicines that he believes might help Big Jim. I’m here to be utterly honest and tell you what happened to your kind. None of us were.” Hollow Kingdom told in the voice of ST, begins: “. In ST’s words, “Big Jim was never the same again. ST retrieves the eyeball and stores it in the cookie jar, but not before Big Jim begins to drool and retreats to the basement where he begins to poke his fingers into the wall. One day an already eccentric Big Jim begins to exhibit the most bizarre behavior after one of his eyeballs falls from his head. ST’s identity problem permeates this fable, and he has as much to learn from a murder of crows and other animals, as we, the readers do. ST loves Big Jim and considers himself more human than crow. ST lives with Big Jim and a lop-eared bloodhound named Dennis. ST was taken in as a fledgling by Big Jim, a beer-swilling, Cheeto-loving guy who lives in a Craftsman home in a Seattle neighborhood. Without giving too much away, Hollow Kingdom is the story, or fable, of a crow named ST, and the world in which he finds himself, a world changing in the most dangerous and macabre dimensions. Now, two months into the Covid19 stay at home orders, I would scrap the above paragraph and simply recommend, before reading Kira Jane Buxton’s Hollow Kingdom, go online and Google T. Those introductory words to my review of Hollow Kingdom were written in November 2019 and published in the Concord Clayton Pioneer in December 2019.
In novels, they don’t if you find birds and beasts talking in a book you are reading you can be sure it is not a novel.”
It is called a novel, but I still adhere to Mary McCarthy’s caveat from The Fact in Fiction, “In fables and fairy tales, as everyone knows, birds and beasts talk. Are you a nature lover? A hiker? A botanist? A stargazer? A bird watcher? If so, please consider Kira Jane Buxton’s debut book, Hollow Kingdom.
0 kommentar(er)
