A bold, if somewhat uneven, speculative thriller that’s as ambitious as it is unpredictable.
A ragtag group of friends discovers that not everything is as it seems in Casamassina’s supernatural mystery with SF elements.
Mason Kowalski is stuck in a dead-end job he hates, writing copy for his boss at a health-food company while taking care of his elderly grandmother in his free time. He regularly experiences stress, due to a generalized anxiety disorder, but he becomes alarmed when he also suffers vivid hallucinations and debilitating headaches. When Mason’s boss confronts him about missing work, he experiences an episode that he accidentally captures on video—only to discover later that the recording lacks audio, aside from his own voice, which sounds as if he’s possessed: “the gruesome voice moans into his ears. Through lungs clogged with tar. Sick with infection. Steeped in nightmares.” Terrified, Mason confides in his best friend and neighbor, Cassy, but his life quickly unravels when he learns that his boss has been murdered—and that he’s the prime suspect. Later, Mason has another attack, during which he unwittingly forces the police to destroy evidence; he escapes custody, but he knows that the police will soon be on his trail. With no idea of how to prove his innocence, Mason, along with Cassy, turns to Rudy Davidson, a former Navy SEAL and current San Mateo police detective. Determined to understand Mason’s condition, the trio run experiments to identify its source to little avail; then Mason encounters a mysterious man with a “shadow” of his own. They soon learn the man has been investigating a suspected supernatural serial killer.
Casamassina, a novelist who’s best known for his work in video game journalism as a cofounder of IGN, crafts a fictional world that feels both cinematic and intimate. However, his ambitious blend of various genres and themes sometimes blurs the novel’s focus. His background in storytelling shines throughout; the novel offers a vivid sense of place and mostly tight plotting, and the brisk prose grounds the surreal narrative in believable rhythms of friendship. Mason is an endearing and sympathetic character whose struggles with anxiety feel authentic. Readers may wish for greater nuance in the supporting cast, though, as their archetypical portrayals sometimes reduce them to ideas, rather than fully realized individuals. The dialogue is punctuated by coarse and often vulgar language, which reinforces the story’s gritty atmosphere. The story, however, takes a drastic turn more than halfway through the novel, shifting from an urban supernatural mystery to a futuristic SF thriller—a lively but disorienting change that may not appeal to all readers. The narrative threads unravel toward the novel’s end in favor of an operatic showdown that will leave readers with more questions than answers. Still, the novel does effectively gesture toward social and ecological themes, depicting a world that’s truly damaged by human excess. These motifs, while fleeting, give the book a timely resonance that will appeal to fans of genre fiction that looks at contemporary issues through a fantastical lens.
A bold, if somewhat uneven, speculative thriller that’s as ambitious as it is unpredictable.Pub Date: today
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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