A supernatural tale that offers a peculiar but engrossing vision of the future.
In Grass’ novel, a coroner in a post-apocalyptic world braves a nightmarish series of events involving mutants and a mythical beast.
The newest body in Frankie Attanasio’s morgue is the stuff of legend. Dreck is, or was, a creature whose stories parents told to scare misbehaving children. The body on the slab sports elklike antlers and three-fingered hands, and evidently, it’s no secret that Dreck is there; the Reconstruction Corps—essentially the future’s version of the FBI and CIA—wants to pick up the body. But a team can’t make it to Seven Points, in what used to be Pennsylvania, until an impending blizzard passes. In the first of a string of baffling turns, Frankie has a vision of Dreck cryptically telling him, “FIND!” Soon afterward, the coroner finds 13 coins on Dreck’s body, the same coins that a local, well-known “Anonymous Hero” uses as a calling card. Other people want the cadaver and coins, as well, including Seven Points’ mayor. Meanwhile, an odd “gathering of kooks and soapbox preachers, screechers and freaky creatures” forms outside the mortuary. Frankie may find solace and allies in the sewers, where some disfigured people live, but it’s clear that more aggressive types in the “upstairs city” are gunning for him. The coroner has other surprises waiting for him, as well, including some that relate to his own somewhat murky history. His story culminates in a daunting confrontation that unfolds in an otherworldly landscape, and it’s one that Frankie likely won’t survive.
Grass’ initially perplexing narrative becomes clearer as its progresses. It gradually clarifies mysterious figures and unknown motives as well as Frankie’s connection to Dreck. Its fictional world features quite a bit of violence, with fights that turn bloody and gory rather quickly. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of comic relief—in part due to recurring TV talk show Vox Oculii, whose host, Darcy Gantz, is prone to jumping to bizarre conclusions. For example, when the mayor tells her that Frankie isn’t cooperating with him regarding Dreck’s body, she throws out unfounded, sensationalist accusations against the coroner. Grass’ compelling dystopia is set in a future after a catastrophic Long War in which the protagonist fought as a soldier. Still, for a post-apocalyptic world, it appears that most infrastructure, at least in the United States, has remained intact. At the same time, a few people have odd, hilarious notions about the past; for example, some regard Sammy Davis Jr. and others from “the Packrats” as holy figures and consider publications such as Penthouse to be worthy ancient texts. Frankie makes for a solid hero who proves capable in scuffles, be they physical or verbal. The author deliberately steeps minor characters in obscurity, so their personalities don’t shine through until the latter half. However, mutant ally Truckie, who’s not exactly trustworthy, displays irresistible charm almost immediately, as when he bombards Frankie with weird but funny insults, such as “You bitch of a bastard.”
A supernatural tale that offers a peculiar but engrossing vision of the future.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73588-853-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Dickinson Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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