Interstitial fiction at its most engaging and mind-bending.
If the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit were an even darker comedy, you might come close to this charmingly bizarre SF noir.
In Neuwien-Grunstadt, an ecologically sustainable reinvention of Vienna, infrastructure maintenance and service industry tasks are performed by Gehirner, genetically modified animals that are supposed to remain as unobtrusive as possible. Unbeknownst to humans, the Gehirner have built their own, often contentious, society. Skotch is a raccoon who’s left his official job as a trash collector at his manufacturer’s company, Uzco, to go freelance as a private investigator. Now, his former turtle boss at Uzco, Benson, has hired Skotch to find Doctor Meece, a country mouse—and a genius chemist—recently arrived in Neuwien. Unfortunately for Skotch, a lot of other parties—criminal rat gangs, battling squirrel armies, and an anarchist group including a toad, among others—are also interested in Meece’s whereabouts, and they all seem to think Skotch knows a lot more about the situation than he’s telling. Where is the mouse, and just what is he planning? A noir thriller with a raccoon private eye is an inherently silly concept. But this novel works because Tchaikovsky takes his world so seriously. These characters are real; the stakes are real. The story cleverly blends noir, the author’s ongoing interest in how nonhumans might think, and another theme beloved of British writers, the turbulent personal lives of the “invisible” servant class (it might seem like a stretch to connect this novel to Downton Abbey, but they definitely share DNA). If the story lacks anything, it’s that there’s no true representative of the most delightful noir trope, the femme fatale. A cat named Tybelle and a stoat called Szerky do pose considerable physical dangers to Skotch, but as they’re all different species, there’s no sexual tension involved. But that departure from the noir standard only underscores just how nonhuman this milieu is, which is at least part of Tchaikovsky’s point.
Interstitial fiction at its most engaging and mind-bending.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781250290335
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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 fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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