A trim but solid time-tripping tale that genre fans will likely appreciate.
In Venenga’s SF series starter, a suicidal widower in 2009 leaps into a Colorado waterfall only to emerge hundreds of years later in a troubled post–World War III America.
Nicholas Smith is an academic in emotional agony after the death of his cherished, newly pregnant wife, Amy, during her military service. He attempts to end his own life by jumping into a Denver-area waterfall near where he and Amy first met. Inexplicably, the widower finds himself very much alive and being roughly handled and tormented by a group of brutal inquisitors led by a fiendish cleric-type called Gabriel. It appears that Smith has teleported 1,000 years into the future. A third world war laid waste to the entire Earth, but in North America there arose a powerful and vicious band of religious fanatics, the Righteous, who have spread an empire throughout what used to be the United States. They threaten Smith with execution for his blasphemous action of violating the waterfall, which turns out to be some sort of Righteous sacred site. However, a squad of the Sovereign Brotherhood comes to his rescue—a ragtag resistance movement that pits itself against the Righteous. Nicholas’ new saviors largely embrace him in fellowship, and the hero comes to realize that he has fulfilled their prophecy about the coming of a warrior who will prove decisive in an ongoing battle. But one of the problems Nicholas now faces is that the meaning of the victory implied in the prophecy is open to interpretation.
First-time author Venenga opens this SF/fantasy series with a book that’s refreshingly Hobbit-brief, honing the adventure in the manner of the best of vintage pulps and making every word and chapter matter rather than bloating things to a genre-fashionable, fully annotated page count. The dystopian retro-future that she conjures, though, is appreciably less detailed than, say, Middle-Earth, and the setting raises a lot of questions before the finale (which leaves things on quite a cliffhanger). It is taken for granted, for instance, that the post-nuclear, post–WWIII culture here has somehow neglected or willfully forgotten how to develop weapons. Swords, knives, and bows and arrows constitute the bulk of the Righteous’ and the Sovereign Brotherhood’s armaments—that is, until Nicholas dazzles everybody with his supposed innovation: the trebuchet catapult. That said, flying machines, remote-controlled automatons, and even advanced biomechanical technology also exist, which will require a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of readers; hopefully, a real corker of an explanation awaits in later books in the series. Readers should also be advised that, despite their supposed religious zealotry, the Righteous are a rather vaguely defined, nondenominational bunch of bullies claiming divine inspiration; they certainly aren’t clearly representative of any particular creed, philosophy, or sect. A web of prophecy threads through the latter part of the book and brings up a fate-versus–free will argument, but it remains underdeveloped at this early stage of the game.
A trim but solid time-tripping tale that genre fans will likely appreciate.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 979-8713976613
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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