Swine -- Fiction. |
Human-animal relationships -- Fiction. |
Survival -- Fiction. |
Farms -- Fiction. |
Horror fiction. |
Psychological fiction. |
Domestic pig |
Hogs |
Pig |
Pig farming |
Pigs |
Sus domestica |
Sus domesticus |
Sus scrofa domestica |
Sus scrofa domesticus |
Animal-human relationships |
Animal-man relationships |
Animals and humans |
Human beings and animals |
Man-animal relationships |
Relationships, Human-animal |
Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc. |
Survival skills |
Farmsteads |
Available:
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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
From Josh Malerman, the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie, comes the legend of Pearl, a strange new monster unlike any other in horror (previously published as On This, the Day of the Pig ).
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL * "Daring readers should find this tale of a malevolent telepathic pig to be a memorable experience."-- Booklist (starred review)
There's something strange about Walter Kopple's farm. At first it seems to be his grandson, who cruelly murders one of Walter's pigs in an act of seemingly senseless violence. But then people in town begin to whisper that Walter's grandson heard a voice commanding him to kill.
And that the voice belongs to a most peculiar creature: the pig named Pearl.
Walter is not sure what to believe. He knows he's always been afraid of the strangely malevolent Pearl. But as madness and paranoia grip the town and the townspeople descend on Walter's farm with violent wrath, they begin to discover that true evil wears a human face.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Malerman (Bird Box) offers a muddy, meandering horror tale that nevertheless contains some memorably upsetting images. The residents of small town Chowder, Mich., grapple with the presence of Pearl, a telepathic pig with the ability to control the minds of humans and drive them mad with hallucinations. Among those affected are a farmer's daughter who fights to protect her family from the pig that terrified her in her youth, a trio of stoned teenagers who explore Pearl's farm only to uncover mind-melting horrors, and a broken businessman who must finally confront the malevolent force that has haunted him for a decade. As the bodies pile up, the townspeople's paths converge at Pearl's barn, where they must maintain enough sanity to defeat Pearl once and for all. The novel suffers from thin characterization and a lack of narrative momentum, and though Malerman's exclamatory style lends itself well to the scarier moments, the story never quite manages to work its way around to coherence. This is best suited for Malerman's die-hard fans. Agent: Kristen Nelson, Nelson Literary. (Oct.)
Kirkus Review
On a small Michigan farm, a freaky, mind-controlling pig named Pearl messes with people's heads--and extracts literal pounds of flesh--to avenge the cruel mistreatment of his species. Before farmer Walt Kopple acquired Pearl as a piglet, someone cruelly abused one of the animal's eyes. Walt named the pig after discovering a humanlike eye beneath an unsightly flap of skin, which was "like finding a pearl inside a dark clamshell." Walt trained Pearl, who sits like a person, "like he would a child." Through an eerie form of ESP, Pearl learned to manipulate people's thoughts and silently command other pigs. After beheading a pig in a bizarre fit of rage and insisting another pig made him do it, Jeff, the ill-fated Walt's seventh grade grandson, becomes the talk of the town, leading three of his schoolmates to go out to the farm for cheap thrills. Bad mistake. Soon enough, Jeff's brother, their anxious mother--who fled to Brazil after high school to escape her odd premonitions about Pearl--and a pair of cops become part of the mayhem. Though the wild premise of the book is initially hard to take seriously, you quickly surrender to the creepy vibe and the Bird Box (2014) author's ability to keep you guessing. In one great scene, Jeff thinks he is being slowly crushed in a small room by a monstrously expanding pig. Part twisted fairy tale, part animal rights protest, part PTSD drama, and part Triumph the Insult Dog, the novel never runs out of unsettling doors to open. A strange, un-put-down-able thriller. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Jeff, a young boy, travels with his mother and brother to his grandfather's farm. They disperse and Jeff ends up at the pig pen. Then he grabs an axe and whacks a pig's head off and, when asked why, claims that "Pearl made me do it!" Pearl is the farm's longest-lived resident, an eerily anthropomorphic pig with one deformed eye, who has inexplicably remained alive while his fellow pigs were sent to slaughter. Pearl has a history of exerting strange influence over nearby people, and Jeff's shocking act of violence seems to be the latest and most gruesome example. The book is a reprint of a 2019 release, and its horror tilts toward the unusual, even the perverse, and will not be to everyone's taste. But daring readers should find this tale of a malevolent telepathic pig (Animal Farm meets Carrie, perhaps?) to be a memorable experience. Although it's very different in tone, the novel shares the same kind of racing narrative that made Bird Box (2014) hard to put down and is Malerman's most accomplished work outside of the Bird Box series. It will likely be divisive and will probably be one of the most-discussed books in horror this year.
Library Journal Review
Malerman (Bird Box) fortifies a well-established body of work with his latest, a novel about a psychic pig's murderous rampage. Pearl, a deformed pig on a farm near Chowder, MI, seems to be a mere curiosity until he manipulates his owner's teenage grandson Jeff to maul another, healthy pig. When Jeff blames Pearl, Pearl begins his unholy war against humanity. Surreal internal conflicts fit the small-town setting perfectly, even if the characters sometimes stall into fugue-like thoughts. Pearl finds the latent guilt in everyone--from a meatpacking tycoon, to a dedicated police officer, to a high school student dreaming of the outside world--and twists it to his own purposes. Despite this, Pearl only exacerbates existing problems in order to inflict his own punishment. Malerman's work is an intimate horror in a highly localized scope, as well as an examination of the way a community accounts for the mistakes it perpetuates. Narrator Sarah Mollo-Christensen's even tone captures the highly personal nature of the drama, but sometimes the prose wants to move faster than her voice does. VERDICT Buy it. Possibly Malerman's best.--Aaron Heil