MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe first third of The Borrowed Hills unfolds with a pleasurable, slow-burn assurance ... What follows is an antic procession of action-movie clichés ... Once the Tinley plot reaches its blood-soaked conclusion, the novel gets back on track, returning to the original cast in its elegiac final third ... At its most resonant and powerful when the human drama does not overwhelm, but takes its proper place in the pitiless and timeless landscape on which all of nature’s tenants — man and animal alike — live and die.
George Saunders
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... it seems that nearly a decade later, Saunders is no longer so sure about the possibility of transformative heroism or resistance, or what that might even mean. The prevailing mood throughout is much more muted and uncertain, with a concomitant diminution in linguistic vivacity. The language the characters speak and think in is flatter, deader, at once more anodyne and anguished ... Saunders has tasked himself with treading a fine line in these stories: How to depict the incapacitating malaise of despair without succumbing to it? He does not always completely succeed ... Here, as in one or two other stories, it feels as if the setup and the characters interest Saunders less than the opportunity to wallow in moral conundrums and impasses of conscience ... a spiky, at times difficult collection, seldom providing the reader with much in the way of catharsis. But these are stories worth reading, the best of them as thought-provoking and resonant as a fan of Saunders might expect. Eschewing the speculatively richer, more dramatic question of what happens after the system comes crashing down, Saunders focuses instead on the queasy, knotty consequences of our present dilemma: What if it doesn’t?
R O Kwon
PositiveThe Guardian\"The Incendiaries is a book of careful feints – the emphases in the story never fall where you expect, but Kwon is always in total control. She writes with aphoristic concision and a disciplined sense of what to leave out ... The Incendiaries is a startlingly assured book by an important new writer.\
John Darnielle
RaveThe GuardianJohn Darnielle’s second novel, Universal Harvester, very much fits the contemporary puzzle-box aesthetic. In other respects, it is strikingly and enchantingly out of time ... Darnielle has subtle fun teasing out the reader’s assumptions as to what kind of novel Universal Harvester might turn out to be. The opening chapters’ autumnal mood of studiedly low-key smalltown ennui and bereavement suggest one kind of story. The 'cursed movie' trope portends a turn towards the horror or gothic mystery genre. But Darnielle’s narrative cuts an oblique channel through all these expectations ... In the end, and for all its narrative leaps and disquieting gestures toward genre, the novel makes most sense as a piece of regional portraiture, an eerie but lovingly detailed delineation of a landscape that, like all landscapes, is part external reality and part memory ... Though set less than a quarter of a century ago, at its uncanniest and most affecting, Universal Harvester feels like a document from a civilisation that vanished aeons ago.
