These extraordinary tales prove to be both spine-chilling and profound.
Characters in this debut collection of dark short stories struggle with escaping their pasts—often with terrifying results.
In this volume’s opening tale, “Skeletons,” five friends, one of whom seemingly mesmerizes the others, go camping. They live in a bizarre world where animals roam in skeletal form, from dinosaurs to saber-tooth tigers. The other stories follow suit, blending familiar characters with disturbing imagery and circumstances. “The Lifespan of Shadows,” for example, sees a house go to spooky lengths to ensure that feuding sisters will not leave behind their inherited childhood abode. Stufflebeam infuses her collection with a somber theme of letting the past go, with nostalgia as a glaring detriment. In one tale, Nostalgia is literally a drug. In the title story, a woman, using a machine to relive her long-ago relationships, likens it to an illness without a cure. While the author shrouds her narratives in metaphors, it doesn’t make horrific sights any less gruesome. That’s certainly the case in the superb “The Split.” Emma moves away from her parents to live with her girlfriend, a decision that literally splits her—half of her body stays in the Texas home where she grew up. Recurring characters among the predominantly female cast link many of these tales, including the collection’s final three stories, which form a short but grand SF trilogy. It begins with a woman named Robin Kirkland, who works at a company that makes synthetic companions. She becomes obsessed with the glitchy, damaged ones, many of which end up in a subway mingling with the homeless. The second tale explores shady tech firms that may be harming female employees, and the concluding story focuses on hackers infiltrating a billionaire’s beta virtual reality game. Throughout the volume, Stufflebeam writes with masterful pithiness and genuine insights. At one point, the woman in the title story muses: “I grip her skin and remember why I loved her. But, also, why I stopped.”
These extraordinary tales prove to be both spine-chilling and profound.Pub Date: July 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952283-22-2
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Vernacular Books
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.
A fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit.
Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife—and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. To do that, she’ll have to get off the barren island she’s forbidden to leave, cross the dangerous Verdant Sea, the even more dangerous Crimson Sea, and the totally deadly Midnight Sea, and somehow defeat the unbeatable Sorceress. The seas on Tress’ world are dangerous because they’re not made of water—they’re made of colorful spores that pour down from the world’s 12 stationary moons. Verdant spores explode into fast-growing vines if they get wet, which means inhaling them can be deadly. Crimson and midnight spores are worse. Ships protected by spore-killing silver sail these seas, and it’s Tress’ quest to find a ship and somehow persuade its crew to carry her to a place no ships want to go, to rescue a person nobody cares about but her. Luckily, Tress is kindhearted, resourceful, and curious—which also makes her an appealing heroine. Along her journey, Tress encounters a talking rat, a crew of reluctant pirates, and plenty of danger. Her story is narrated by an unusual cabin boy with a sharp wit. (About one duke, he says, “He’d apparently been quite heroic during those wars; you could tell because a great number of his troops had died, while he lived.”) The overall effect is not unlike The Princess Bride, which Sanderson cites as an inspiration.
Engrossing worldbuilding, appealing characters, and a sense of humor make this a winning entry in the Sanderson canon.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250899651
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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