Wonderfully detailed worlds propel these enthralling stories.
Paxson’s collection of SF and speculative fiction short stories ranges from the unsettling and humorous to the outright bizarre.
In this book’s opening tale, “Here Our Steps Faltered,” Ali belongs to a group of online roleplayers. The internet allows them to play as different people throughout various places on Earth, but for Ali, there’s soon a blurring of his flesh-and-blood existence and the virtual world. Many of the tales herein likewise unfold in other worlds, in dystopian futures or on other planets entirely. The author, who breaks these stories into categories, sets five of them in an underground city on the planet Tarnus, including the novella-length “Lejina’s Song.” This tale finds Lejina, in desperate need of medicine for her father, agreeing to double for a popular local singer, Winjilles Thringe. At first, she’s simply posing to pass herself off as the performer. When Thringe is injured, however, Lejina’s continued portrayal gets her closer to the singer’s band members and more entangled in whatever shady things Thringe may have been doing. Other categories include stories set on the planet Mudball and in a near-future New York “where the law didn’t work anymore.” In the former section, three species (gorgons, crocodilians, and humans) more or less learn to co-exist; in the latter, the Pure Sons of God deliver their own justice by shooting people who won’t work for them—or who they merely don’t like. Capping off the book is a handful of one- and two-page stories, including “Pie and Wings,” in which a guy at a diner instantly falls in love with a waitress.
Paxson often playfully animates these speculative settings with more familiar plots. For example, in “Trizark,” Nedrillo Goodrin, a gorgon farmer on Mudball, attends his very first wedding—his son’s union with a human woman. With gorgons, humans, and crocodilians bumping elbows, there’s a very good chance that a fight will break out. “Troupe” is about a government agent, Gordon Axelrod, who jumps onto the H.M.S. Pinaforewith clawed Tyrakians in pursuit. They want the mysterious metal egg that Gordon has and threaten everyone onboard if he doesn’t hand it over. When Gordon is mistaken for an actor in an upcoming musical, that’s just one more thing for him to worry about. Some of these tales are dark, and even grotesque, though never excessively so. In “From the Wall,” a long-imprisoned creature escapes and vows to kill myriad humans, starting with the man it feeds on and whose “flayed skin” it wears like a suit. The author’s razor-sharp prose aptly depicts these strange places and diverse species; even a situation as recognizable as a man reacting to a Dear John letter generates a memorable passage: “I sat in the big cushion for a long time letting sweat run down over the letter and dissolve its words. My thumbs rubbed until most of the writing was a bleary mess and the paper was soggy. I ripped it into limp shreds and tossed it against the wall. Another damn lovely day.”
Wonderfully detailed worlds propel these enthralling stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Dana Paxson Studio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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