A flawed but intriguing thriller with plenty of terrifying weather catastrophes and an admirable commitment to scientific...
A debut novel kicks off a multipart saga about worldwide natural disasters.
Triggs opens his story with a bittersweet evocation of the 2004 Thailand tsunami, as a widower returns to the country for the 15-year anniversary of the event that killed his family. But something far worse is approaching. Sudden earthquakes ripple across the globe, and satellites reveal the emergence of a new landmass in the Indian Ocean. This geological phenomenon is dubbed the Andaman Event. Six months later, strange weather emerges around the world: a frozen hurricane sinks a fishing fleet, a tornado rips apart homes in Australia, and a gigantic sandstorm pummels the Western Sahara. To make matters worse, Infinity, the satellite company in Palo Alto, California, responsible for virtually all weather forecasts, experiences service outages, leaving most nations blind to impending disasters. Brad Bentley and Steve Jaeger, Infinity’s founders, search for the outages’ cause, eventually suspecting that a computer virus may be shutting down some of their satellites. But they slowly realize that the glitches may reflect a global “tumble” triggered by the Andaman Event. The book covers broad ground over 43 chapters, sometimes focusing on the investigation and sometimes following people fleeing for their lives, such as an archaeologist in a Land Rover in the Western Sahara during the monster sandstorm. Too much time is spent on Brad and Steve looking for a virus, and some characters’ roles are unclear—a few chapters examine apartment dwellers in Queens, for example, but these sections don’t tie into much else. Yet some discursions, such as a chapter about a doomed Russian ship, are well-written portraits of desperation and ratchet up the novel’s tension. Characterization remains a weak point. Most individuals are either “types” or not developed beyond their high intelligence and affability. The geological and meteorological processes described have clearly been meticulously researched. While technical explanations occasionally become tedious, many readers should enjoy a natural disaster narrative that embraces scientific inquiry over Hollywood gimmicks. Triggs ends on a high note; readers will likely look forward to the second installment, which will hopefully have a tighter plot construction and more layered characterization.
A flawed but intriguing thriller with plenty of terrifying weather catastrophes and an admirable commitment to scientific exploration.Pub Date: June 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9507-1
Page Count: 494
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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