A secret history that toys with the mythos of dark academia while reveling in its excesses.
What happens when students at a school for the paranormal decide that enough is enough?
Best known for video games, queer horror, and a collaboration with Richard Kadrey (The Dead Take the A Train, 2023), Khaw detours to visit an elite school and the damaged young adults it serves. At 21, Alessa Li wakes up with a start to find she’s been kidnapped from home in Montreal and apparently enrolled in college, simply because she’s incredibly dangerous. In fact, the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted is less an homage to Hogwarts than a gory rebuttal dressed in wizard’s robes. The story moves between two timelines; the first offers Alessa’s introduction to her creepy classmates, while the second finds them all under siege later in the titular library. “Appendage to the main campus, it acted only in the faculty’s interest, which seemed to revolve exclusively around fucking us students over,” Alessa explains. Among the 20-odd students, cult member Portia transmogrifies into some kind of insectoid critter every now and then; Eoan sacrifices himself by feeding his own body to the school’s ravenous hosts in order to protect his friends; Delilah is an “immortal sacrifice,” dying over and over again in the service of the gods; while Rowan is a “deathworker” whose destiny is foretold by prophecy. There are some intriguing elements—and it’s often hard to take. Like other postmodern antiheroines, among them Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black (Blackbirds, 2015, etc.) and Julie Crews from The Dead Take the A Train, Alessa’s primary operating mode is pretty much caustic bitch, and her classmates don’t temper it much. Whether the deadpan violence and body horror is excessive is a matter of personal taste, but there’s no denying that the whole thing is pretty squelchy and it’s not always easy to follow. Proceed with caution.
A secret history that toys with the mythos of dark academia while reveling in its excesses.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781250877819
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nightfire
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
An existential crisis that steps on its own final moments.
With only a month left until the world ends due to a swiftly approaching black hole, Don and Rodney, a retired gay couple, road-trip from Maine to Washington to spend their final days with their son.
After reports that a planet-swallowing black hole is making its way toward Earth, Rodney and Don—who have been together for 40 years and survived everything from homophobia to the HIV crisis—decide to pack their belongings into an RV, say goodbye to their neighbors, and travel from Camden, Maine, to Washington to uphold a promise to spend their final days with their son. They can’t wait any longer, since there’s already chaos around the country: “Military vehicles in the streets of most cities and towns. Looting, rioting, the burning of cars and buildings and people, all of it had already happened.” As they make their way west across the country, they encounter fellow travelers ranging from close-knit families to free-spirited hippies, some of whom have come to terms with the impending end of the world and others who haven’t. While the story seems to be asking readers what they would do if they had 30 days left to live, and reflects on what different kinds of acceptance might look like in the face of unavoidable tragedy, it loses some of its poignancy in a series of thinly padded monologues about the meaning of life. Clearly intended to pack an emotional punch, it’s failed by an abrupt ending, and the way the journey’s mystery—which will be obvious to many readers—is revealed by an info dump in the last chapter.
An existential crisis that steps on its own final moments.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781250881236
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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