All things cease to appear

Review by New York Times Review

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CRITICISM: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, by A. O. Scott. (Penguin, $17.) The author, a co-chief film critic for The New York Times, reconsiders the relationship between criticism and the art it assesses; rather than art's antithesis, such evaluations are part and parcel of the creative process. "Criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood," Scott writes. DREAM CITIES: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World, by Wade Graham. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) Graham chronicles the familiar institutions around which the world's cities are organized - including shopping malls, monuments and suburbs - and profiles the designers and planners who imagined them. Cities, in his view, are best seen as "expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live." A MOTHER'S RECKONING: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, by Sue Klebold. (Broadway, $16.) Klebold, the mother of one of the teenagers who killed 13 other people and themselves at Columbine High School in 1999, approaches her book gingerly: Aware that the project could draw ire or claims of insensitivity, she uses it to warn about mental illness and consider what could have been done to prevent the tragedy. THE BRICKS THAT BUILT THE HOUSES, by Kate Tempest. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Tempest, a spoken-word poet and a rapper, reprises characters from earlier work in this, her debut novel. Harry is socking away money for the future by dealing cocaine to the wealthy, while Becky, an aspiring dancer, works as a masseuse. Tempest turns her ear for language to their love story, as well as the characters that surround them. "The cumulative effect is deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its empathic humanity," our reviewer, Sam Byers, wrote. ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR, by Elizabeth Brundage. (Vintage, $15.95.) How much tragedy can one farmhouse hold? When Catherine Clare, a college professor's wife in small-town New York, is murdered in her bed, it recalls an earlier trauma at the house: an incident that left three brothers orphaned. Brundage unspools stories of the Clares' marriage and their home in this masterly thriller. ONLY THE ANIMALS: Stories, by Ceridwen Dovey. (Picador, $18.) Dovey's narrators are the souls of animals linked to artists and writers, including a dolphin with an affinity for Ted Hughes. In these "tragic but knowing" tales, "the wronged do not howl at their executioners as much as hold their actions in the light, and accept their place in history," our reviewer, Megan Mayhew Bergman, wrote. ?

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Readers know at the outset of Brundage's (A Stranger like You, 2010) cunning psychological thriller that Catherine Clare has been savagely murdered and suspect, if they don't know for certain, that the crime was committed by her husband, George. What follows is a crafty dissection of the dissolution of a marriage that was doomed from the start. Ill-suited opposites, Catherine and George only marry when Catherine becomes pregnant. An art historian who never completed his doctoral dissertation and never owned up to this lapse, George lands a plum position at a tony private college in the Hudson River Valley. Small-town reticence coupled with rural isolation provide further challenges to their shaky union, and a series of inexplicable and unsolved crimes only add to the uneasiness of Catherine's life in their impoverished farmhouse, where the previous owners committed suicide. As she builds the case against the sociopathic husband, Brundage also constructs a dynamic portrait of a young woman coming into her own at the fringe of the 1970s feminist movement and implicates a destructively self-protective community that fails to seek justice. Brundage's account of a marriage in free fall will, inevitably, be compared to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012), even as it rises to greater literary heights and promises a soaring mix of mysticism, mayhem, and madness.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Brundage's (bestselling author of The Doctor's Wife) searing, intricate novel epitomizes the best of the literary thriller, marrying gripping drama with impeccably crafted prose, characterizations, and imagery. In 1978, Ella and Calvin Hale respond to their farm's failing fortunes by committing suicide. As their sons, Eddy, Cole, and Wade, are taken in by nearby relatives, their farmhouse in upstate Chosen, N.Y., is bought by outsiders. College professor George Clare, his beautiful wife, Catherine, and their toddler, Franny, buy the house and seem picture-perfect, but appearances deceive. George, an expert in Hudson River painter George Inness (an actual figure, whose artistic theories and Swedenborg-influenced philosophy run through the novel) is a dark soul with a young mistress and a violent history; insecure Catherine takes his abuse until the women's movement helps empower her to leave him. Then George appears at a neighbor's door, announcing that he has found Catherine murdered in their bedroom. Though locals blame him, the crime remains unsolved. Seen as cursed and haunted by its dark history, their house sits abandoned until 2004, when Franny, now a surgical resident, re-encounters painful memories and her former babysitter Cole Hale on a trip to empty it. Moving fluidly between viewpoints and time periods, Brundage's complex narrative requires and rewards close attention. Succeeding as murder mystery, ghost tale, family drama, and love story, her novel is both tragic and transcendent. Agent: Linda Chester, Linda Chester Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Art history professor George Clare comes home to find his wife brutally murdered and his small daughter alone in the house. This grim opening sets the tone for a chilly tale of relationships full of deception and betrayal, as Brundage explores the web of friendships, family ties, loves, and hates that surround the Clares. The story retreats in time from the murder, each chapter a character sketch covering the Clares relocating from the city and settling in the farming and college town of Chosen, NY, and arrives at a coda dealing with the crime's fallout many years later. Narrator Kirsten Potter does a riveting job with the varied cast, sympathetic and cold by turns. -VERDICT Recommended for readers looking for character-based crime stories and small-town noir. ["Part mystery, part ghost story, and entirely brilliant, this title will entrance book clubs and literary fiction readers": LJ 3/1/16 starred review of the Knopf hc.]--Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Libs., Atlanta © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

You get in your car, drive to work, park, and go inside. An ordinary dayexcept, back at home, someone is chopping your wife to bits, the opening gambit in Brundage's (A Stranger Like You, 2010, etc.) smart, atmospheric thriller. Here's the thing about creepy old farmhouses: they're full of ghosts, and ax murderers lurk in the tree line. Art history professor George Clare is a rational fellow, but when he moves into the country to teach at a small-town college, he finds his colleagues making odd assumptions: since he knows a thing or two about Swedenborg, then he must be game for a sance. Catherine, his young wife, whose "beauty did not go unnoticed" even out among the yokels, has long since sunk into a quiet depression. They have problems. She doesn't live long enough to grow to hate the country, though she senses early on that the place they've bought from a foreclosed-on local family is fraught with supernatural danger: "Until this house," she thinks, "she'd never thought seriously of ghosts, at all. Yet, as the days passed, their existence wasn't even a question anymoreshe just knew." Yup. Question is, who would do her in, leaving a single grim witness, the terrified daughter? There's no shortage of suspects on the mortal plane, to say nothing of the supernatural. Part procedural, part horror story, part character study, Brundage's literate yarn is full of telling moments: George is like a "tedious splinter" in Catherine's mind, while George dismisses her concerns that maybe they shouldn't be living in a place where horrible things have happened with, "As usual, you're overreacting." But more, and better, Brundage carries the arc of her story into the future, where the children of the nightmare, scarred by poverty, worry, meth, Iraq, are bound up in its consequences, the weight of all those ghosts, whether real or imagined, upon them forever. With a storyline that tightens like a constrictor, this is a book that you won't want to read alone late at night. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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February 23, 1979 Again, it was snowing. Half past five in the afternoon. Almost dark. She had just laid out their plates when the dogs started barking. Her husband set down his fork and knife, none too pleased to have his supper interrupted. What's that now? June Pratt pulled aside the curtain and saw their neighbor. He was standing there in the snow, holding the child, her feet bare, neither of them in coats. From the looks of it, the little girl was in her pajamas. It's George Clare, she said. What's he selling? I wonder. I don't see a car. They must've come on foot. Awful cold out. You better see what he wants. She let them in with the cold. He stood before her, holding the child out like an offering. It's my wife. She's--- Momma hurt, the child cried. June didn't have children of her own, but she had raised dogs her whole life and saw the same dark knowing in the child's eyes that confirmed what all animals understood, that the world was full of evil and beyond comprehension. You'd better call the police, she told her husband. Something's happened to his wife. Joe pulled off his napkin and went to the phone. Let's go find you some socks, she said, and took the child from her father and carried her down the hall to the bedroom where she set her on the bed. Earlier that afternoon, she had laid her freshly laundered socks over the radiator, and she took a pair now and pushed the warm wool over the child's feet, thinking that if the child were hers she'd love her better. They were the Clares. They had bought the Hale place that summer, and now winter had come and there were just the two houses on the road and she hadn't seen them much. Sometimes in the morning she would. Either when he raced past in his little car to the college. Or when the wife took the child out of doors. Sometimes, at night, when June walked the dogs, you could see inside their house. She could see them having supper, the little girl between them at the table, the woman getting up and sitting down and getting up again. With the snow, it took over a half--hour for the sheriff to arrive. June was vaguely aware, as women often are of men who desire them, that Travis Lawton, who had been her classmate in high school, found her attractive. That was of no consequence now, but you don't easily forget the people you grew up with, and she made a point of listening carefully to him, and acknowledged his kindness to George, even though there was the possibility, in her own mind at least, that the bad thing that had happened to his wife might have been his own doing. he was thinking of Emerson, the terrible aristocracy that is in Nature. Because there were things in this world you couldn't control. And because even now he was thinking of her. Even now, with his wife lying dead in that house. He could hear Joe Pratt on the phone. George waited on the green couch, shaking a little. Their house smelled like dogs and he could hear them barking out back in their pens. He wondered how they could stand it. He stared at the wide boards, a funk of mildew coming up from the cellar. He could feel it in the back of his throat. He coughed. They're on their way, Pratt said from the kitchen. George nodded. Down the hall, June Pratt was talking to his daughter with the sweet tone people use on children and he was grateful for it, so much so that his eyes teared a little. She was known for taking in strays. He'd see her walking the road with the motley pack at her side, a middle--aged woman in a red kerchief, frowning at the ground. After a while, he couldn't say how long, a car pulled up. Here they are now, Pratt said. It was Travis Lawton who came in. George, he said, but didn't shake his hand. Hello, Travis. Chosen was a small town and they were acquaintances of a sort. He knew Lawton had gone to RPI and had come back out here to be sheriff, and it always struck George that for an educated man he was pretty shallow. But then George wasn't the best judge of character and, as he was continually reminded by a coterie of concerned individuals, his opinion didn't amount to much. George and his wife were newcomers. The locals took at least a hundred years to accept the fact that somebody else was living in a house that had, for generations, belonged to a single family whose sob stories were now part of the local mythology. He didn't know these people and they certainly didn't know him, but in those few minutes, as he stood there in the Pratts' living room in his wrinkled khakis and crooked tie, with a distant, watery look in his eyes that could easily be construed as madness, all their suspicions were confirmed. Let's go take a look, Lawton said. They left Franny with the Pratts and went up the road, him and Lawton and Lawton's undersheriff, Wiley Burke. It was dark now. They walked with grave purpose, a brutal chill under their feet. The house sat there grinning. They stood a minute looking up at it and then went in through the screened porch, a clutter of snowshoes and tennis rackets and wayward leaves, to the kitchen door. He showed Lawton the broken glass. They climbed the stairs in their dirty boots. The door to their bedroom was shut; he couldn't remember shutting it. He guessed that he had. I can't go in there, he told the sheriff. All right. Lawton touched his shoulder in a fatherly way. You stay right here. Lawton and his partner pushed through the door. Faintly, he heard sirens. Their shrill cries made him weak. He waited in the hall, trying not to move. Then Lawton came out, bracing himself against the doorjamb. He looked at George warily. That your ax? George nodded. From the barn. Excerpted from All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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