It’s in the moral murk of a politically loaded situation that King finds the richest seam of his story.
Humanity may be a sordid, violent, alienated lot, enslaved by economic and technological systems it no longer controls, but Zero K is a disarmingly humanist work.
The pleasure of writing, of pairing words with another to create a distinct or lingeringly atmospheric or poetic effect, seems beyond King’s concern these days.
King shrewdly connects Hodges’s torment, the stuff of formula cop movies, to larger American feelings of rootlessness and economic despair.
The book delivers on the promise of its title, as it’s full of destruction, misanthropy, and wanton nihilism.
The Angel Esmeralda functions as a career-defining primer whose likeliest audience knows enough to not expect too much of it.
Ann Beattie speaks to her characters’ persistence in the face of loneliness and ambiguity.