An intriguing, haunting fever dream at the world’s end.
Musson’s debut blends apocalyptic fiction with biblical myth in a story about two unlikely heroes and their quest.
Set in an indeterminate time—and world—the story begins with a character known as the Old Man, who is struggling to simply survive in a wasteland where the majority of the population is mysteriously gone. Everything about the Old Man and his reality—from his ramshackle cabin to his half-dead pigs to the sky, which stays a shade of gray—has a hopelessness, a nihilistic heaviness that seems to weigh down everyone and everything. “He, like everyone, had little, and meant less, and ultimately all would return to dust, and the soil would turn over, and in a time none would remember any of the others, and that was just the same as never having existed in the first place.” But when a wanderer called the Kid finds the Old Man and enlists his help to kill a nameless evil who has returned to complete a prophecy concerning the opening of Seals—“It’s happening, just like they said it would….Just like they wrote in the Old Books”—the man reluctantly agrees, and the two set off across a nightmarish landscape in search of the mythical villain. Armed with only a few weapons (the Kid with his rifle and the Old Man with his pistols), the duo witnesses numerous atrocities during their quest of retribution. The prose, stark and simplistic, complements the dark, surreal quality of the narrative: “The Old Man sits up on the small, rickety bed. His legs hang over the side, barely scraping the floor. He’s not a tall man, and it’s not a tall bed.” Additionally, the infrequent New Testament references add a spiritual layer and thematic weight to the apocalyptic tale, particularly at its thought-provoking conclusion.
An intriguing, haunting fever dream at the world’s end.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 176
Publisher: California Coldblood Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
