Several interesting concepts, buried in sometimes-obtuse prose.
This debut sci-fi novel tells of a connections between a strange artifact linked to the biblical Moses and a vast conspiracy.
Peter Marc Vogel works for Nova House, the publisher of the magazine GEO. When he receives a strange package from Dr. Emile Danchenko and his daughter, Irina, he books a flight to discuss it with his own boss in Toronto. At the publisher’s headquarters, Peter meets the researchers, who have evidence of what he calls a “Flying Dutchman”—a phantom vessel that’s seemingly able to “appear anyplace, anytime.” Included in this evidence is a cartouche, located in New Zealand, which points to the biblical Moses burying a strange—possibly alien—device of immense power. For thousands of years, the device has energized the Moses Stone Vault, which seems to travel underground. Peter is assigned to work with people who hope to excavate the vault, and he speaks with the Rev. Michael Odum, who describes a “shadowy over-group” that’s been manipulating humanity for generations. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, Sarah Jane Gustafson is at a massive Kansas City facility for hard-core participants in an elaborate multiplayer video game; she rises through a tournament with her teammates, Jiggles and Romeo, and encounters a strange, disturbing media file that includes imagery that may be connected to the aforementioned vault. In this dizzying, Thomas Pynchon-esque novel, Jones populates his near future with sparkling secondary characters, such as Isaiah Pollenaire and Sanchristo Leonelli, teenage MIT grads and creators of the “Dynamically Anchored Spread Spectrum Language,” “a radical deviation from previous methods of interfacing multimedia content with firmware.” Jones does give readers some mild relief from his bevy of hard-science concepts, occasionally delving into Peter’s relationship with Sonny, his wife from whom he’s separated. Still, even dedicated sci-fi fans will find the storytelling here to be dense and often cryptic; the author offers sentences such as “I want to try that new flash parity algorithm on some random SARTs,” for example, without immediately explaining the terminology. Intriguing characters, such as the telepathic Arkane, appear in the margins and promise conflict on a grander scale in a planned sequel.
Several interesting concepts, buried in sometimes-obtuse prose.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 645
Publisher: Ocean of Stars
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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