A particularly dark science fantasy that’s gloomy even by dystopian fiction standards.
Decades after a mysterious cosmic event killed 95% of Earth’s people, the survivors fight battles while haunted by spirits of the dead in Bryan’s SF novel.
In 2031, the Great Catastrophe, a mysterious cosmic event, occurred, and now about 400 million survivors make up the UEA, an upstart, North American cabal seeking to establish a one-world government. Pockets of violent resistance fighters materialize, but they’re not the only things newly appearing in the dark new world. Lingering spirits of the dead—known as the “unattached”—are restless and ubiquitous. The Great Catastrophe only seemed to spare people who could psychically detect the “anuniverse,” where the spirits dwell, so such hauntings are no small thing. By the 2090s, studying and fighting the unattached has become an obsession for Raile Alton, a UEA “anologist”—basically a ghostbuster—who lost the love of his life, Lily, among others, during a resistance attack. He grieves the fact that he hasn’t ever felt Lily’s phantom presence. Moreover, Raile has been hunting an unattached entity calling itself “Cavusa.” Most unattacheds are bewildered, slowly waning energy patterns, but Cavusa is sentient and homicidal. As Cavusa’s victims pile up and the resistance fighting escalates, the shadowy chiefs of the UEA near their goals, including a body-switching “transference” technique that allows one to live forever. SF fans may be reminded of English writers who blurred the boundaries of science fiction and the supernatural, such as Nigel Kneale and Colin Wilson. There’s a steep learning curve with this novel, though, even for genre followers, due to Bryan’s use of unfamiliar terms such as “physipethic” and “anmatter,” instead of, say, “telekinetic” and “ectoplasm.” There’s a narrative shoutout to H.P. Lovecraft’s work, but the bulk of the story deals with cloak-and-dagger insurgency and guerilla ops with a paranormal tinge. The reversals, surprises, and betrayals are numerous, and the book finishes without a concrete resolution. Invested readers, therefore, will hope for a continuation, even with a grave ambiance hanging over the story.
A particularly dark science fantasy that’s gloomy even by dystopian fiction standards.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9973636-7-8
Page Count: 377
Publisher: Amperception® Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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