A dystopian novel of epic proportions that’s imaginative but unnecessarily protracted.
A small group in New England survives a cataclysmic event tied to a destructive cult and battles for survival in Dering’s SF series thriller.
In the near future, U.S. Army Gen. Eric Hyland is aboard a Utopia Project ship in the Labrador Sea in the North Atlantic, where he’s being forced by an extreme group called “elders” to work on a project that could destroy all of humanity. A program to condition children for a utopian future society has gone very wrong, so the elders now plan to exterminate humanity with neutron beam attacks. Only those aboard the Utopia ships will survive, as will some designated wildlife areas, so Eric is trying to surreptitiously find ways to save his friends and family by carving out other areas to escape the onslaught. The Elders grow suspicious, but Eric manages to pull it off, and his parents, daughter, and some others survive, relatively unscathed. His mother, however, needs a lifesaving drug, and his daughter Sara’s boyfriend is tasked with gathering a supply and driving it to Vermont. Through all the confusion and the destruction, Eric wants nothing more than to escape the ship and join his family, but when the elders take Sara captive, he must rescue her, get off the ship, and get ready for an inevitable showdown. Dering’s dystopian novel, the second in a trilogy, tackles a monumental disaster in a convincing manner by emphasizing the protagonist’s technical know-how, his close relations, and locations that readers will find familiar. The evil scheme is described in chilling detail and the work includes crucial references to the previous installment of the series. The action scenes, battles, and betrayals work well as a cat-and-mouse game, but on the whole, the book feels overly lengthy. The events of the ninth and 11th days after the cataclysm, in particular, go on for an awfully long time, undercutting the narrative tension.
A dystopian novel of epic proportions that’s imaginative but unnecessarily protracted.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73549-293-3
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Pinewald Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2022
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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