An inventive, timely fantasy that’s nonstop fun.
A businessman plans to exploit a portal to a magical realm in this fantasy adventure.
Marc Aaron has a knack for finding oil. He’s traveled all over Africa and the Middle East, guiding his small company, Epoch, to success. When billionaire Roland Griff summons him to New York, Marc leaves Libya immediately. In anticipation of a thrilling new job prospect, Marc asks his wife, Diane, and their children to meet him in Manhattan. The oilman reunites with his family at the Waldorf Astoria hotel after two years apart. Marc receives a chilly reception from his wife and his daughter, who asks, “So, how’s the greenhouse-gas biz going?” Soon, the family is touring the Griff Corp building. To his astonishment, Marc learns that the company’s success with importing goods and materials is the result of a magical gateway. In a subterranean chamber, a strange glowing orb gives Griff access to a medieval realm of elves, orcs, and other magical beings. Griff wants Marc’s expertise in acquiring this Fourth World’s resources. When armed soldiers prepare to enter the gateway, the general, an orc, launches his invasion plan. Robertson has ensured that there’s fun, heart, and excitement in every scene of his latest novel. Marc and Diane’s rocky marriage is a drama on par with the orc invasion; he takes Griff’s offer without consulting her so the family can finally live together. When war hits the city’s streets, events remain entertaining, with a measured amount of gore that never feels gratuitous (“The headless troll turned and felt about awkwardly for its missing cranium”). Robertson’s comedic timing is phenomenal, as when a blowhard general admires his vanilla latte by saying, “If our boys had these in ’Nam we’d have won that war.” Moral and environmental reckonings factor into the finale, e.g., Griff tells Marc, “Drilling for oil, exploiting the locals is what we do, you and I.” A last-minute gambit sets up a potentially bold sequel.
An inventive, timely fantasy that’s nonstop fun.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Gin & Tonic Press
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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