An intriguing series starter that’s packed with colorful characters and detail.
In Vega’s (Majesty’s Offspring, 2011) action-packed fantasy, an American war veteran is recruited for an agency that tracks souls and battles for the fate of the universe.
In 1933, Willem Maddock is unemployed despite the flying expertise that he gained as a pilot during the Great War. Luckily, he meets Samantha Black, who offers him a job, albeit a peculiar one. Black is the director of the Census, a secret government agency that’s described as “something like an embassy between the living and dead.” Maddock initially teams up with Agent Wolfe to help Elder Quorum, the authority in the Spirit Realm, where most souls live. Maddock and Wolfe act as Census Enforcers, rounding up souls that escaped during an accident long ago. Their mission takes them to Germany in 1939 to battle Nazis as well as such supernatural creatures as red-eyed, taloned Rattlers, 9-foot-tall Furies, and souls that have turned into demons. They also aim to stop a sinister scheme to destroy the Sacred Tree, which will effectively end all reincarnation. That’s the first step in a process that will allow the “Oppressor,” aka Lucifer, to walk the Earth, and if the godlike Presence sees evil gaining the upper hand, it may “reset” the entire universe. Vega’s dense tale, the first in a planned series, ably fuses elements of religion with Norse and Greek mythologies. The hefty backstories involve one of Maddock’s past lives as well as what led to the aforementioned accident. The author keeps the narrative moving briskly toward an elaborate final act that’s rife with double-crossings and deception. The action scenes are entertaining and memorable: “Sizzling heads and limbs littered the ground. Some soldiers managed to get away, yelling and screaming, but the flames continued to eat them.” Maddock, however, isn’t the most likable protagonist, and although his 1930s-style vernacular is mostly fun, it also includes talking down to his formidable boss by calling her “doll.”
An intriguing series starter that’s packed with colorful characters and detail.Pub Date: May 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5348-3873-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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