A somewhat uneven but action-packed speculative novel.
In Lionson’s thriller set in the near future, robots have taken over almost every job, and two young brothers in the Woodland family are desperate to hold on to their disappearing values.
The year is 2043, and Jason and Eddie Woodland work precarious jobs in a chop shop to make ends meet and, hopefully, save their family from financial ruin after their sister, Mia, is diagnosed with a rare genetic disease. On top of this, their younger brother is missing, and their town is under constant threat of total destruction due to widening class divides and daily riots. Pushed to their limits, the brothers accept a seemingly simple job—dropping off a bag—that promises to yield them enough money to rescue their family from ruin. But when things go wrong and drugs come into play, Jason and Eddie find themselves in prison, surrounded by even more violence and corruption. Jason fits into the new milieu the best he can, but Eddie, unable to cope with his sister’s inevitable fate, begins to truly suffer. When the siblings are offered a way out in the form of a controversial mercenary training program, they take it. Lionson expertly ups the ante in every chapter of this novel, and the pace is helped along by simple, straightforward prose. A few scenes feel a bit clunky, and occasional plot turns feel predictable. The strength of the family bond is a timeless subject for a reason, however, and in this story, Lionson delivers an unflinching portrait of dedication, resilience, and love above all else. The worldbuilding is also thoughtfully crafted, depicting a near-future dystopia that’s not dissimilar from the present. The novel also has vivid, cinematic action scenes (“Jason struck again. And again, in the nose. There was a nasty crunch and groaning, and the guy fell to his knees and immediately got hit by a boot to the ribs”), and well as a proper cliffhanger.
A somewhat uneven but action-packed speculative novel.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798988414339
Page Count: 588
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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