The Insides

April 25, 2016
Bushnell’s (The Weirdness) excellent second novel begins with Olive “Ollie” Krueger making the kind of throwaway decision we all do at times: she talks to a stranger in a park. However, this stranger is a warlock who wants Ollie and her friend Victor to become a part of a network of magic users hiding in plain sight. But this book is not about magic. It is about people coming to terms with their histories. Chapters alternate from the now adult Ollie, working as a butcher at a high-end Manhattan restaurant prophetically named Carnage, and Maja, a woman gifted with the ability to “locate” objects and people. Ollie is struggling with broken relationships and a child she left behind. Maja is haunted, literally, by her younger brother Eivind. Maja becomes a locator for hire; her clients are a group of white supremacists wanting to find a great magic object to usher in an era that only Hitler could imagine. Bushnell also includes other dimensions, and an ex-Marine named Pig to round out this off-the-wall tale. The alternating protagonists translates into a very fast read, as does Bushnell’s hyper-realistic prose, which effectively captures his cast of characters.

June 1, 2016
Bushnell (The Weirdness, 2014) ventures again into a supernatural-tinged New York City in his new novel. After living as a street magician and a farmer, Ollie Krueger now works as a butcher in a high-concept restaurant, using hard labor to forget what she left behind. But when she notices that her Haitian coworker seems to be using a magical knife, she is no longer able to keep treading water. Norwegian Maja Frienander has the ability to divine information about objects and people, including their location. When she is hired by an extremist group to locate a powerful item in America, she is put on a path that will intersect with Ollie and a mysterious, extra-dimensional space known as the Inside. The Insides is a sometimes brutal, sometimes horrific story about two women struggling with the past and encountering an evil that could have an impact on the course of the world. For fans of urban paranormal narratives and books like The Library at Mount Char (2015).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)