A magic carpet ride—but the carpet just hovers.
Edison's debut is an extraordinary and bewildering fantasy.
In a multiverse consisting of unnumbered universes, nobody dies permanently; instead, they’re reincarnated in new bodies on different worlds with their memories of previous lives intact. Eventually, when the spirit finally tires of multiple lives, it’s drawn to the City Unspoken, where the gateway to True Death is located. At the city’s heart is an enigmatic mechanism, the vivistor, whose function is to grant True Death. Unfortunately, that function is failing. To the city comes Cooper, a gay man from Manhattan, summoned by Alouette, a goddess in disguise; he’s greeted by puzzled beauty Sesstri and the mysterious gray-skinned Asher, who fear the approach of the svarning (possibly an Icelandic word meaning conspiracy), a contagious collective insanity that threatens to destroy everything. Neither Sesstri nor Asher can find a use for Cooper, so they turn him loose. He finds himself in a vast, labyrinthine, overcrowded, rotting metropolis inhabited by murderous aristocrats like Purity Kloo; an insane faerie princess known as the Cicatrix; a captive angel or aesr; gangs of feral Death Boys such as the racist Nixon; psychic vampires or “liches”; the sadistic Lallowë Thyu; and reincarnated historical figures like Thea Philosopater, who was once Cleopatra—all of whom pursue their own unfathomable agendas while few seem inclined to seek True Death. (Then how did they get there? Did they all just get stuck in the gears?) Even a New Yorker like Cooper finds this bizarre; worse, he doesn’t remember dying or any previous lives, and he seems to be the only one in the city with a navel. Edison puts an impressive imagination to work and writes with clarity and precision. But with almost uniformly secretive main characters, the narrative lacks cohesion and drive, and the result, while often dazzling, offers little by way of involvement.
A magic carpet ride—but the carpet just hovers.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3486-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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 new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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