Mockingbird [Mass Market Paperback]

Chuck Wendig (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 28, 2012

Miriam is trying. Really, she is.

But this whole "settling down thing" that Louis has going for her just isn't working out. She lives on Long Beach Island all year around. Her home is a run-down double-wide trailer. She works at a grocery store as a check-out girl. And her relationship with Louis--who's on the road half the time in his truck--is subject to the piss and vinegar Miriam brings to everything she does.

It just isn't going well. Still, she's keeping her psychic ability--to see when and how someone is going to die just by touching them--in check. But even that feels wrong somehow. Like she's keeping a tornado stoppered up in a tiny bottle.

Then comes one bad day that turns it all on her ear.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Balls-to-the-wall, take-no-prisoners storytelling at its best." - Bill Cameron, author of County Line --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Chuck Wendig is equal parts novelist, screenwriter, and game designer - A.K.A. an all-around "freelance penmonkey." You can probably find him on the side of a highway holding a sign, "Will Write For Booze." He currently lives in the wilds of Pennsyltucky with wife, dog, and infant heir to the Wendig throne. You can find him dispensing dubious writing advice at his blog, terribleminds.com.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Angry Robot; Original edition (August 28, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0857662333
• ISBN-13: 978-0857662330
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.1 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He's the author of BLACKBIRDS, DOUBLE DEAD and DINOCALYPSE NOW, and is co-writer of the short film PANDEMIC, the feature film HiM, and the Emmy-nominated digital narrative COLLAPSUS. He lives in Pennsylvania with wife, taco terrier, and tiny human.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bigger and blacker than Blackbirds October 28, 2012

By Dave Versace

Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I adored the squirming rank guts out of Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds - its spiteful arch protagonist Miriam Black with her malign visions of death, its black comedy, its psychopathic bad guys. I loved its bruised and buried but still-beating sense of hope unquashed and fate defied.

The sequel, Mockingbird, somehow manages to find darker places to drag poor Miriam. Unable to face the compromises of an ordinary existence, she reluctantly takes an opportunity to make some semi-legitimate money from her unfortunate affliction - the ability to see how a person she touches will die, in precise and vivid detail. But Miriam being Miriam, she sees more than she wants to and finds a way to make a bad situation worse. Before long she is trying to save the students of a "school for bad girls" from a very sick serial killer. Worse than that, she's suffering increasingly regular visitations from something dressed up as the ghosts of her past, which may or may not be the thing that gave her the death-visions. And worse than that again, she may have to confront the mother she walked out on years ago.

The actual plot is terrific - a serial killer hunt more tense than a tow cable and twisting like a cut snake - but the real meat of the story is in Miriam's confrontations with what could be a spirit guide or a taunting revenant or her own guilty conscience. Her self-doubt, dark sarcasm and a regular one-two punch of instinctive lying followed by the telling of blunt unpalatable truths keeps friends and allies at arm's length, but she can't avoid the uncomfortable revelations that come out every time she closes her eyes (and even a few times when she's awake).... She is faced with the horrible realisation that there might be more to her visions than just some spiteful curse; she may be burdened with the unbearable horror of having a purpose.

Mockingbird dashes along like a fox with the hounds at its heels, though many of its worst horrors are reserved for the moments of breath-catching contemplation. The antagonists of Blackbirds were vicious and deranged, but like cartoon monsters compared to the monumental sickness that Miriam has to deal with here. The characters are rounded and distinct, but often defined more by their flaws than any possible virtues. Miriam remains a compelling lead, wounded and sharp-tongued and incapable of surrender, but thankfully this time out her truck-driving man Louis gets a bit more depth as well.

The smart dialogue and prose rolling out with belligerent ease make it easy to read even the more confronting scenes, many of which are more emotionally than physically brutal. Wendig reserves some of his best, most evocative writing for the death-vision sequences, which are even more beautiful and dreadful than in the previous story. There is worse stuff than red balloons in this one. The language is, of course, Wendig-esque - the man loves a colourful turn of phrase, and his palette favours blue.

Mockingbird is a supernatural thriller that wanders close to the border with horror more than once, but never commits itself fully to hopelessness and despair. For all her darkness, Miriam Black is a survivor with a streak of nobility to go with her self-loathing and remarkable instinct for making the most destructive choices in life. Read more ›

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An enchanting read August 28, 2012

By Lakis Fourouklas

Format:Kindle Edition

"Power and wisdom are born of trauma." Mockingbird is the story of a young woman who is gifted, if one could say so, with a weird kind of power, a power that feels to her more of a curse than a blessing.

This is the story of Miriam Black, who's a psychic. When she touches somebody she can see how and when he or she is going to die. For quite some time now she's been living in a trailer park with her best friend and occasional lover, one-eyed Louis.

Miriam is a very unhappy woman. She tries hard to adapt in a life that really doesn't suit her. Being normal is not something she can make happen, not when she can sense things the way she does. "She wants to go home. If only she knew what that really meant."

Louis is trying to bring some balance in her life, make her realize that if she tries hard enough she can become happy, or at least, kind-of-happy, but she knows all too well that that's not true and she snaps at him: "You want me to be someone I'm not."

She's sick of her everyday life, so she decides to leave and "commit to her lack of commitment." She's not afraid of the life on the road, she's tough, she can handle any situation; she cannot listen to Louis and his down-to-earth logic and get stack in that place anymore.

The road though is long and the first car that stops to pick her up belongs to no one else but Louis himself. They travel together for awhile, they fight, she gets off the car and then they meet again. And it's exactly then that she's convinced to follow him to a boarding school to meet a teacher, who feels certain that she's going to die soon. The woman is willing to pay Miriam just to tell her if she's right....

However, when she gets there, things start to get really complicated, because she has a very bad feeling about the place. She may be "a poison pill," as she calls herself, but she doesn't like to see people die, especially young people. She's quite certain that there's at least a murderer loose on the premises and she's determined to find out who that is and save the victims' lives.

Of course that will not prove such an easy thing to do. She'll find obstacles rising in her way time and again, she'll have to fight her inner demons and the evil of men, and she'll even have to confront her own past in order to make sense of the things that bother her.

Hers will be a long and dangerous journey, but as she's, at some point, going to find out she's not alone in this. The teacher, whose worst fears, or rather hopes she confirmed, will be there to give her a hand and so will be Louis - always her friend, until the very end.

"The only way to divert death is to give it a life," we read. And Miriam is determined to do just that; to sacrifice the guilty in order to save the innocents. But, will she make it? And if she does, will that help her find some sort of peace within herself?

A great novel that combines the genres of urban fantasy and crime fiction and which gives the reader quite a few thrills with its twists and turns, as well as some rare moments of pure poetry and magic. Highly recommended. Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A high-octane thrillride that burns with Bukowskian poetry and won't let you go October 10, 2012

By Scott Kennedy

Format:Mass Market Paperback

It's impossible to stop reading this book. It sinks its talons in and won't let go. Really. I stole every minute I could find to get back to it and finish it.

But better than just being thrilling, the book builds upon and deepens the themes of its predecessor, Blackbirds. There's a resonance to this book that's both haunting and beautiful, and at times Miriam Black's thinking slips into lines whose profane beauty could easily fit into a poem by Bukowski or, more appropriately, Crow by Ted Hughes.

But Wendig is such a disciplined writer that such moments of wordy goodness never slow the narrative or even pull you out of the book; they simply deepen Miriam's character and make her even more compelling.

This is a unique mix of Urban Fantasy meets Pulp Noir built with a superbly crafted plot. Read it. It's a blast.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Even more gripping than "Blackbirds" September 26, 2012

By B. Copenhaver

Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I loved Miriam Black in "Blackbirds." The sequel is even better. More Miriam, more action, more twists. I would've read this straight through, if it wasn't for things like work and family and sleep getting in the way. As it was, I finished in 2 days. And now I can't wait for the next book. Chuck Wendig is a great storyteller, and I just adore the way he crafts a description or a piece of dialog. If you like horror, suspense, whacked-out characters - pick this up (after reading "Blackbirds" first).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars dark, brutal and unforgiving September 24, 2012

By W.M.M. van der Salm-Pallada

Format:Mass Market Paperback

Earlier this year I read, reviewed and loved Chuck Wendig's first Miriam Black novel, Blackbirds. Even though it took me a bit, I fell in love with his caustic, sharp and foul-mouthed protagonist, Miriam. Combined with a fascinating premise, a psychic who only foresees the manner and moment of a person's death, and an edge-of-your-seat suspense, she blew all my reservations about Blackbirds away and I was really looking forward to reading Mockingbird; an anticipation which turned out to be justified, as Mockingbird was even better than Blackbirds. A word of warning: Mockingbird is the second in a series and talking about it will automatically give spoilers for Blackbirds, or rather one big spoiler. If you want to remain unspoiled for Blackbirds, now is the time to click away!

When we reunite with Miriam, she seems to have taken both a step back and a step forward in trying to lead a normal life. One of the things I loved about Miriam in Blackbirds is that she's stopped running away from her gift, she's even turned into the way she makes a living, even if it means a life adrift. In that sense she's taken a step backwards, she gone from using and acknowledging her gift, to hiding and denying it. Where she has taken a step forward is in the settling down and making an emotional connection to Louis. Settling down isn't going smoothly and the road still calls her name, but she's making an effort. Of course, this sort of peaceful existence can't last, we all saw that coming, so we rejoin her story on the day she snaps and walks out. Instead of going backwards or forwards, she's taking a step sideways in her development. She goes back to using her gift, finally soothing the almost withdrawal-like itch she's had, but the cracks Louis has made in her walls aren't as easily cemented closed again.... In the first book Miriam's motto seemed to be 'It is what it is', in Mockingbird she develops into 'I am who I am', with all that entails. And I loved to see this growth.

Wendig shows us more of Miriam's unhappy past and the demons she still deals with on a daily basis, which go a long way to creating more understanding and sympathy for Miriam's idiosyncrasies and her unapologetic inability to from a bond with other people. However, Louis has managed to crack her walls a tiny bit and throughout Mockingbird we get glimpses of a less misanthropic Miriam, who is drawn to helping people despite herself. This slow thaw of Miriam's defences also seems to make it easier to connect with secondary characters. Where I felt emotionally distant from many of the characters in Blackbirds, in Mockingbird there are far more people to care about, such as Louis and Katey and to a certain extent Wren. How much of this is actually due Miriam's changing outlook on life or whether it's more a case of increased familiarity with Wendig's remains to be seen. It would be interesting to see how this develops in further books.

While we learn a little bit more about the onset of Miriam's gift and its workings, it also gets a little weirder with the addition of Trespasser. The source of her visions becomes more and more ambiguous and it also gives an entire new dimension to the use of her gift. I loved this shift in the use of her gift though, I thought it made for a good set up for further entries in this series, in the sense that it creates the possibility of more serialised mysteries to solve with an overarching storyline worked in, much like many crime series do. And you have to hand it to Wendig, he writes a mean mystery. Mockingbird's central mystery is fantastic. I really and truly hadn't seen the twist to the story coming and I adored it. In addition to being unexpectedly twisty, it is also completely creepy and shudder-inducing. I've read and watched plenty of crime and mystery series, but this was one of the creepier whodunits I've read in a long time.

Mockingbird was a fantastic book; all the reservations I had regarding Blackbirds were absent or improved on in Mockingbird. Wendig is proving to be a must-read urban fantasy author and I can't wait for his next book, the first in a new series, next June. I also deeply hope we'll get to see more of Miriam and discover where she'll drift next and what her gift will ask of her. If you haven't yet given Chuck Wendig's Miriam Black series a try, you're missing out. Mockingbird, like Blackbirds, isn't for the easily offended or weirded out and definitely not for the faint of heart, but if you like your urban fantasy dark, brutal and unforgiving then you shouldn't miss reading Miriam Black's adventures.

This book was provided for review by the publisher. Read more ›