The defiant story of an impossible enigma who only yearns to be a real girl.
A young woman’s personality is the result of a startling experimental procedure, leaving her to struggle with the question of who she really is.
This debut novel by multigenre fabulist Morrow is a haunting exploration of memory, identity, and mortality set in a vaguely sinister alternate-reality Montreal circa 1925. In this rendering, scientists have discovered a peculiar method of extracting memories from people and delivering them into “Mems,” half-alive creatures whose purpose is to experience the memory over and over again in a fortress called the Vault until they die. But not our narrator, oddly enough. The story is told by a 19-year-old Mem who identifies as "Elsie," though her true designation is “Dolores Extract No. 1,” meant to keep the memory of a car crash in 1906 from troubling her “source,” Dolores Shepherd. But Elsie is a fully formed individual, capable of forming her own memories, the only Mem who's been allowed to live independently outside the Vault. Repeatedly she tells us, “I am a memory. Now I suppose I’ll live like one,” as she struggles with her place in this strange world. Called back to the Vault, Elsie learns that because Dolores has reached her maximum number of Mems, she is in danger of being “reprinted,” wiping out her unique self. Protected by a kindly professor and his wife, Elsie encounters broken Mems, fractured Sources, and a smitten scientist during her evolution into a new kind of being. In studying memory, Elsie becomes even more aware of the damage resulting from this cruel practice. “What kind of people are we if we can’t traverse the landscape of our own memories?” she asks. “What kind of people do they become who refuse?” These philosophical explorations ultimately culminate in a disturbing clash between Elsie and Dolores prime. With her dizzying concept, richly imagined narrator, ornate setting, and first-rate storytelling, Morrow offers an epiphany for readers of speculative fiction with echoes of ideas explored in films like Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The defiant story of an impossible enigma who only yearns to be a real girl.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944700-55-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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