An intriguing but uneven SF thriller.
A journalist and a movie star get pulled into an alien coverup in this SF debut.
Centuries in the future, after the Great Atomic War, not a whole lot has changed. People watch soccer, smuggle drugs, and see movies—and the government still keeps the existence of aliens top secret from the public. Clem Reader is a recently divorced journalist in New Los Angeles, and while he’d love to cover real news, he’s forced to chase down gossip on Bollywood stars. He needs a vacation, but when he returns to the family home—a fishing village on the Baja peninsula—he realizes that some of his relatives are involved in strange, covert activities. Then, on his return to New LA, he discovers that guerrilla forces massacred a convoy of Marines and civilians at a truck stop he’d passed only days before. Even as Clem tries to figure out what happened—there are whispers of some kind of military technology being involved—he still has to cover the entertainment beat. That’s how he finds himself sitting down for an interview with Saroyan Pashogi, a famous Iraqi actress and tabloid sensation. Saroyan has just broken up with her soccer star boyfriend, and she sees something in the dogged journalist that pulls her in: “They talk about many things. They quickly discover that they’re both orphans, and they talk a long time about what that means to them. As an orphan in the foster home in New Tehran, she discovered her talents, and her determination had given her the willpower to escape from the bad part of town to the good part of town.” Their budding romance is endangered when it becomes apparent that the government does not like that Clem has been sniffing around the truck stop massacre. Adding two more bodies to the count is nothing if it means keeping the truth of alien life a secret—and if Clem and Saroyan aren’t careful, that’s just what will happen.
Despite its future, post–nuclear war setting, the world Eysenbach imagines is surprisingly similar to readers’ own. At its best, his prose has a plain-stated lyricism, as here where he describes Clem’s native village: “Pretty much most of the village is out squid fishing tonight. The Koreans are buying, and although they’re paying dirt, they’re the only game in town. From the land, it looks like there’s a new city on the ocean.” But the writing is often rough and sometimes confusing. The book’s structure—it leaps around a large cast of characters, many of whom are never fleshed out—slows the pacing and sidelines the two protagonists. The plot ends up being a fairly silly one and one that could easily have taken place in the present day, which will cause readers to wonder why the author bothered setting it in an invented future. (The world may still have squid fishermen in several hundred years, but will it retain a nearly identical media landscape?) The novel is so ambitious in some ways that it makes the thin characters and familiar storyline that much more disappointing.
An intriguing but uneven SF thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 29, 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
A fun read. Terrorists make great Clancy fodder.
Evildoers plan attacks from America to India, and Jack Ryan Jr. is a prime target.
In Washington state, a man and his family are murdered, and President Jack Ryan learns it is another Poseidon Spear incident. Three retired members of that counterterrorism group have been killed now, and the U.S. government suspects a mole in its midst. Meanwhile, the Umayyad Revolutionary Council believes it has a holy and wholly anti-American mission. Against this backdrop, Jack Ryan Jr., and his fiancée, Lisanne Robertson, visit Delhi, India, to attend the wedding of Srini Rai, the brilliant surgeon who attached Lisanne’s prosthetic left arm. Lisanne had lost her arm in Tom Clancy Shadow of the Dragon (2020). Jack and Lisanne are both operators working for the Campus, a covert group that executes secret presidential directives. A wedding is a happy occasion, and the engaged American couple intend the trip as a vacation. Jack and Lisanne will attend a sangeet, an elaborate pre-wedding party. But it isn’t long before they survive a suicide bomb attack. As with all Clancy novels, there’s plenty of action on a global scale. In simultaneous strikes, terrorists plan to contaminate America’s Western water supply with radioactive waste from Washington’s Hanford nuclear power plant, blow up a spectacular new bridge in Kashmir, and kill the evil Ryan—or Junior, at least. It will be At-Takwir, the end of days. There is an appealing mix of Indian culture, high-speed action, and the rich lode of details that characterizes the whole series. And in the background lingers the question on several characters’ minds: Have Jack and Lisanne set their own wedding date?
A fun read. Terrorists make great Clancy fodder.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780593718032
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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