An engrossing and well-crafted SF tale with timely themes.
In this debut SF novel, a detective who investigates faked deaths finds himself on the trail of a man who might change his life.
Raphael Lennon is an End Man: an employee of the Norval Department of Marketing Necrology, whose business is to hoard the online personal data of the recently deceased and sell it to the highest bidder. He’s also a struggling artist with a fear of crossing streets, which confines him to living within one square mile of Los Angeles. Raphael specifically works as a so-called “possum specialist,” tasked with rooting out those people who have faked their own deaths in an attempt to disappear. His current case is physicist Jason Klaes, whose accounts have been active even after he was recently declared dead. But why would Klaes fake his death? (“The usual alarms hadn’t sounded: no darknet sites, no online queries about disappearing from society, no underage girlfriends or boyfriends, no cryptocurrency plays or big insurance policies.”) Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the case is why Raphael’s boss, infamous CEO Geo Maglio, wants Klaes investigated so badly. Raphael follows the clues, and before long he comes across a conspiracy involving new technologies, dangerous parties, and secrets linked to his own family. Raphael soon learns that when you pry too deeply into the business of the dead, sometimes you end up joining them. Austin’s prose is urgent and colorful, painting a dystopian world at once alien and familiar: “A mile above the museum, a weather drone circled, prepared to alter the weather if the dense, white clouds darkened. Even from a distance the machine appeared huge and menacing, as if designed for warfare.” The premise is highly imaginative, and the author brings it to life with a group of colorful and well-drawn characters. Raphael in particular has a complex interior life that will pull readers into his mission. For all the cyberpunk elements, the novel is ultimately a contemporary parable about people’s increasingly online lives and the extent to which they have become products to be bought and sold without much consideration or consent.
An engrossing and well-crafted SF tale with timely themes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
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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