Lacking the storytelling virtuosity of World War Z or the emotional impact of The Passage, the novel suffers from a woefully...
A young survivor of the zombie pandemic finds himself thrust outside the comfort and safety of post-apocalyptic Manhattan and into the wastelands of America in this coming-of-age novel from Wellington (The Hydra Protocol, 2014, etc.)
Nineteen-year-old Finnegan has been living what’s left of the good life in what’s left of Manhattan, protected from the occasional zombie living in the outer boroughs by polluted rivers and the lack of transportation in post-crisis America. He’s grown up, with no memory of the pandemic, in a survivor’s settlement in Times Square, raised by his parents, fishing in the old subway tunnels and scavenging food from abandoned apartments, listening to the radio for reports from the Army and the bits of the old government that are still viable. That is, until the day his mother turns into a zombie, a result of the virus’s 20-year gestation period. Finn is now suspected of harboring the virus as well. He’s given a plus-sign tattoo—proof of his positive status—and a ride to a medical camp in Ohio. But when he finds his government-issued driver murdered at the far end of the George Washington Bridge, Finn has to set out on his own. He quickly makes an enemy of a looter named Red Kate and just as quickly makes friends with a survivor named Adare, a big man with a big car and a harem of young girls he uses both for sex and for looting abandoned buildings for swag to trade to the Army for gas and food. Among the harem is Kylie, a teen girl whose deadened personality Finn somehow finds irresistible. Finn’s halfhearted attempts at rabble-rousing to free Kylie and her sisters ends badly for Adare and—when the ragtag group of misfits ends up at the Akron medical camps at last—for the girls as well. All except Kylie, of course. Finn’s principled attempts at an old-fashioned strike are laughable at best. (“My life was less important than what was happening here. Than what could happen, if the cards played out right,” Finn says, nobly.) In Akron he’s reunited with his old Manhattan buddy Ike (the kid who killed Finn’s mother when she zombied out) when Ike helps the positives break out of camp, and Finn and Kylie lead him and the rest into the brave new world they’ll make together—if they can survive Red Kate and the deadly warload named Anubis.
Lacking the storytelling virtuosity of World War Z or the emotional impact of The Passage, the novel suffers from a woefully underdeveloped and naïve hero, a love story without an ounce of heat, and a carload of ancient zombie tropes just begging to be put out of their misery.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-231537-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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