Bathing the Lion

Starred review from August 4, 2014
Carroll (The Ghost in Love) drenches prosaic modern life with horrifying surrealism in this hallucinatory contemporary myth, which mingles terror and awe with family strife. Unhappy couple Dean and Vanessa inexplicably share a dream with Kasper, Vanessa’s lover, and Jane, her employer. Brought together by grieving widower Bill and the mysterious child Josephine, Dean and company discover that they were once celestial mechanics, fixing the universe’s mistakes, before their minds were wiped. With chaos splintering reality, reversing time, and swallowing other Fixers, these emotionally scarred agents must return to the fight against ravenous entropy. Cosmic conspiracies, paranoia, and awe are grounded in the everyday, the impossible made probable by Carroll’s authoritative wordplay. Flawed characters struggle with identity and love, selfishness and fear, in a world where wonder can always be found in the mundane. This lyrical and thematically rich novel is not to be underestimated.

August 15, 2014
Five people share a miraculously detailed and disturbing dream in Carroll's latest speculative fiction (The Woman Who Married a Cloud, 2012, etc.). Their experience sparks a need to understand their roles in a cosmic drama played out over eons. A mundane Vermont town doesn't seem like the place to discover the underlying mechanisms of the universe, but these five seemingly ordinary citizens begin to see impossible things: visions of the past, hoped-for children becoming real, even a red elephant bearing a map on its hide. Soon, they remember their common past as "mechanics": nonhuman beings with a gift for fixing what Chaos breaks. But why are these retired mechanics being called back? What dire event has spurred an unprecedented gathering of minds? Our heroes (though some are decidedly nonheroic) must navigate a landscape of dream and metaphor to find out, all the while balancing their human impulses against their mystic calling. The scope of Carroll's ideas outpaces the clarity of his writing, which features abrupt perspective shifts and some dizzying moves through multiple timelines. While the purported theme is nothing less than the fate of the universe, the action is all internal. Don't expect a grand battle or glorious revelation. Here, characters talk and argue their fumbling ways to truth, and those who follow the strange logic of the meandering plot, picking up clues like breadcrumbs, fare best. Though short, the novel is not a breezy read; it's a quiet, character-driven musing on the value of life and death that lovers of magical realism should embrace but that readers wishing for a more cohesive story will find frustrating.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2014
What begins as a novel about a relationship crisis and five interconnected lives takes a sudden turn towards the surreal and absurd when the characters wake up having shared an outlandish dream. No mere ordinary humans, all five have dormant, special capabilities that are now in urgent demand. The world is being threatened by the ever-encroaching powers of Chaos, and with little time to lose, the five must recall their past lives to come to its aid. As they near the ultimate battle, though, the road to those memories becomes increasingly difficult to traverse, both for the characters and the reader. In fact, the book's pacing never achieves fluidity, nor is its world ever fully imagined. Sudden leaps through time and perspective leave the story feeling strangely cobbled together and detract from the larger emotional themes usually found in Carroll's work. Nevertheless, Carroll is known for his magical fiction, and his newest novel is sure to please fans who have been missing him since his last novel, The Ghost in Love (2008).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2014

Dave doesn't know that his wife, Vanessa, is having an affair with his business partner Kaspar. Bar owner Jane employs Vanessa as a singer but secretly loathes her. Josephine is a strange girl who appears and leads Kasper to Jim Edmonds, a man grieving over the recent loss of his wife to cancer. Surprise! This initial section of the book is all a shared dream. The characters sharing it are retired Mechanics, intergalactic beings who have taken human form with no memory of their previous existence. Being human is a reward for their work keeping the universe running, and their divided dream is evidence of an impending disaster. The rest of the book offers numerous revelations about what is really happening, which involves various plot twists, charming discontinuities, and a softly spoken crescendo. VERDICT Philip K. Dick meets Kurt Vonnegut with startlingly well-drawn characters, and the overall effect is one of the poignancy of day-to-day existence contrasting with the galactic scale of "life, the universe and everything." Readers with flexible expectations for fiction will find this a hoot. Recommended to those for whom the meaning of life can be "42." [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/14.]--Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2014

Five people in a New England town awake from the same vivid dream remembering that they were once "mechanics," charged with cleaning up the cosmic crises that results when Chaos swirls through the universe. They'd been retired with their memories wiped clean but are being called back because Chaos is returning. From a cult author Neil Gaiman calls " brain-smooshing."

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.