A riveting techno-thriller with a compelling human drama at its core.
In this dark, intricate thriller, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter squaring off against a fascist American government of the near future.
It’s 2033 and the gold bugs have been proven right: too much quantitative easing has produced hyperinflation, the collapse of the American economy and the breakup of the United States into regional successor regimes. The most odious of these is the Federated States, a white supremacist dictatorship in the Old South that relegates blacks, Latinos and Asians to second-class citizenship. After his girlfriend is shot by soldiers during a peaceful protest, Jim Reed, a black lawyer from Atlanta, joins up with a multiracial resistance organization called the Freedom Legion and discovers his knack for masterminding terrorist spectaculars. Hotel bombings and guerrilla attacks provoke more repression; the Federated States initiates an Ultimate Solution to rid its territory of blacks, and Jim and his comrades conceive a monumental strike to decapitate the dictatorship. Wellnitz plays on strands of both left- and right-wing paranoia but manages to make his lurid scenario both believable and exciting. His fictive world has a down-at-the-heels desperation that brings an ugly, all-American racism bubbling to the surface. The well-paced plot regales readers with nerve-wracking action scenes, serpentine intrigues and tense, engrossing procedural as Freedom Legion operatives work out the mechanics of procuring and deploying weapons of mass destruction. Wellnitz’s sharply drawn characters are cool, hardened men and women, but they are also three-dimensional people wracked with misgivings and emotional conflicts. Their world is an intensified but all too familiar version of our own, and we can’t help sympathizing with them even as they undertake the most extreme—even monstrous—measures to wrench it back to sanity.
A riveting techno-thriller with a compelling human drama at its core.Pub Date: July 29, 2010
ISBN: 978-0595501717
Page Count: 324
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2010
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
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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