Densely packed, SF-tinged high fantasy that mildly satirizes the genre.
In McCormick’s fantasy/SF novel, a lone mystic gathers allies to defeat the hordes of a sadistic warlord on a fantastical future Earth.
In the far-flung future, Earth is now called Arreti. The humans (referred to as “makers”) are gone, replaced by their final creations. Following a tragi-comical contact with aliens (“Sominids”), who were friendly but refused to share any of their technology or wisdom, mankind slipped into an existential funk. Scientific genius Edward Rohta countered with the implementation of “brands,” genetically modified, intelligent beings (typically blended with animal DNA) who took over roles such as laborers, warriors, sex workers, and spies from the indolent Homo sapiens. Brands were not meant to live long or reproduce, but these fail-safes…failed. Now the makers are gone, killed by particularly hostile brands. The North American Midwest has become a patchwork of bizarre beast-clans, fauna fiefdoms, goblin-esque guilds, and other motley creatures. Tyrant warlord Xhaknar, created to be a GMO “super soldier,” conquers and subjugates the plains with his hordes, guided by his cruel programming. He is opposed by Geldish, a rare “wizard” whose brand was granted powers of levitation and psychic cognition for use in mining ops. Geldish gathers representatives of other “fringe” races (including the seductive Succubus and the equine Llamia) under the banner of the “Brittle Riders.” Xhaknar is mostly amused by the feeble resistance effort—but Geldish has a secret plan. Readers who can hack pathways through the eye-glazing terminology and jargon (“Geldish and BraarB looked at the eight dead, dismembered Naradhama and smiled. Just then, two haven-lords appeared from the shadows”) will be rewarded with a densely populated high fantasy yarn that casts a gimlet eye on the genre’s tropes and excesses. While the title suggests a sequel, this saga installment works fine as a standalone.
Densely packed, SF-tinged high fantasy that mildly satirizes the genre.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2016
ISBN: 9781945987045
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Azoth Khem Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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