A crisply written, inventive, complicated brew of a novel, though one that could have used some boiling down.
An intriguing and deftly plotted (if overstuffed) hybrid of dystopian SF, medical thriller, and queer romance.
Chaotic, irreverent Sunil Rao, an ex–MI6 agent plucked from jail for the assignment, and cool, analytical, ultraorderly Adam Rubenstein, an American intelligence officer, have worked together before under extremely trying circumstances, and when a bizarre series of events unfolds at a U.S. air base in Britain, culminating in the sudden appearance in the countryside of a full-sized generic American diner, the two are reunited to investigate. Rao has the uncanny ability not only to detect lies, but to intuit the truth of anything said in his presence, and the buttoned-up Adam is the only person he can't read, an inscrutability that makes their collaboration possible and creates odd-couple tension. Soon they land at a top-secret lab in Colorado, on the trail of a new pharmacologic substance called Prophet. The drug, which resembles mercury, has the effect of spontaneously creating comfort objects from the nostalgic memories of those exposed to it...but with horrendous side effects: The affected person disappears down the rabbit hole of the memory, plunging into a comalike state, sometimes even dying. Worse, those effects—aided by reckless experimentation—are intensifying; the protean substance keeps evolving unpredictably. Adam and Rao turn out to be perfectly suited to the investigation; after an initial exposure, the former is immune to Prophet (it even shrinks from him), and the latter proves able to extract and assimilate the drug. The book’s first section feels a bit languid and talky, but the pace accelerates in the middle, and the long final action sequence, in which Rao, Adam, and a team of military contractors negotiate a bizarre, surreal, deadly desert landscape of plush toys (some of them animate), bicycles, arcade games, golden apple trees, and the like, is excellent: pulse-pounding, philosophically fascinating, even blackly funny. The romance plot feels both fresh (in who its principals are) and creaky (there's too much slow-on-the-uptake and swelling music).
A crisply written, inventive, complicated brew of a novel, though one that could have used some boiling down.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780802162021
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.
As the world dies, the remnants of the patriarchy and their minions keep right on terrorizing the weak.
Caustically original in the same fashion as her chilling Tender Is the Flesh (2020), Bazterrica’s latest devises an end-of-the-world scenario with a Handmaid’s Tale vibe. The most palpable tragedy is that no matter how the world dies, women always seem to end up with the same sorry fortune. The story is set in an unknown wasteland where all the animals on Earth have perished, with callouts to a mysterious, poisonous haze and a collapsed world. Our narrator is a young woman relegated to sheltering in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, an isolated, fundamentalist order subservient to an unseen, deity-like “He,” and divided into strict castes. Among these are the Enlightened, kept isolated from the rest of the order behind a mysterious black door; the Chosen, divine and devoted prophets who are ritually mutilated; and the servants marked by contamination, who sit just below the narrator’s caste, the unworthy young women. The story is a little tough to follow due to the narrator’s fragmented memory, not to mention lots of interruptions from the old ultraviolence and body horror. Although men are banned from the cloistered stronghold, it’s a relentlessly sadistic and violent society ruled by the Superior Sister, enforcer of His will and the instrument of punishment up to and including torture and death. The narrator is already mourning Helena, a spirited iconoclast who couldn’t survive under such oppression, when a new arrival named Lucía sparks fresh hope that may prove as fruitless as everything else in this bleak testament to suffering. As a subversion of expectations and an indictment of unchecked power, it’s unflinching and provocative, but readers expecting a satisfying denouement may be left wanting.
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668051887
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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