Mockingbird [Kindle Edition]

Chuck Wendig (Author)

Book Description

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

About the Author

Chuck Wendig is a novelist, a screenwriter, game designer, and all-around freelance penmonkey. He has contributed over two million words to the roleplaying game industry, and was the developer of the popular Hunter: The Vigil game line (White Wolf Game Studios / CCP). He, along with writing partner Lance Weiler, is a fellow of the Sundance Film Festival Screenwriter’s Lab (2010). Their short film, Pandemic, showed at the Sundance Film Festival 2011, and their feature film HiM is in development with producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey. They both wrote the digital transmedia drama Collapsus, which was nominated for an International Digital Emmy and a Games 4 Change award.

Product Details

• File Size: 410 KB
• Print Length: 400 pages
• Publisher: Angry Robot; Original edition (August 28, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007GYNO10
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,808 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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.

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.

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.

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.