A sometimes-engaging cross between No Country for Old Men and The Twilight Zone.
Along the United States’ southern border, a pregnant, teenage Mexican girl fleeing a murderous criminal crosses paths with an alien life form temporarily stranded on Earth in this sci-fi thriller.
Elena Garcia is a desperate 16-year-old on the run from Chief Ramirez, a crooked, 40-something Mexican cop who raped and impregnated her. If the baby is born and authorities take action against Ramirez, he knows that he’ll become a liability to the narcotics kingpin he serves. Intervening in this situation are two extraordinary visitors, CoWoP and MiLiS, vaguely described, humanoid aliens with elongated heads. The two, a male and a female, are on a long-term orbital mission to monitor Earth, which is considered an undesirable, backwater assignment. A life-support failure aboard their ship forces the aliens to temporarily abandon their physical bodies and send their “essences” into unwary Earth people. While MiLiS is bored inside the body of a Hollywood hedonist, CoWoP goes into Elena, where his presence is mistaken by the girl for “Soldier John,” a folk-saint figure to whose spirit Mexicans appeal for aid and protection. Can this invisible, otherworldly companion give Elena an edge in her seemingly hopeless fight against Ramirez? Sharry (In the Dooryard Bloom’d, 2015, etc.) turns to the sci-fi genre for a tense, terse, action-packed, and timely narrative that crosses space-alien first-contact tropes with a drug-crime nightmare and refugee crisis near the U.S.–Mexican border. Despite some highly sentimental elements, it succeeds more often than not. There’s certainly a lot going on in the story despite the novel’s slim page count. The author grants his aliens personalities, class/caste issues, and slangy battle-of-the-sexes dialogue not unlike earthlings’—a mixed bag that works in some passages better than others. Meanwhile, the vile Ramirez acquires unexpected complexity, and even minor, peripheral figures are surprising. Fortunately, the familiar comparison of outer-space castaways to immigrant newcomers in America is downplayed.
A sometimes-engaging cross between No Country for Old Men and The Twilight Zone.Pub Date: April 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71751-480-6
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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