An odd novel that shouldn't work but somehow does.
A police officer connects with a mysterious race of aquatic humans in this inventive debut.
Cara Gray, the protagonist of visual artist Musgrave’s debut novel, took an unlikely route to becoming a cop. She joined an activist camp after school but soon ditched it to join the police force, where she’s initially assigned to work in data surveillance. While she’s good at her job, she fails to prevent a school bombing that kills more than 1,400 people and is demoted, becoming a police liaison to the community of lambdas, a race of small humans that have adapted to living in water. The lambdas “keep a very low profile,” making their homes in flooded basements and working low-income jobs. They’re also the target of increasing harassment and violence from hateful people who believe that a splinter group of militant lambdas were behind the school bombing; they endure beatings and graffiti saying things like “fuck off fishman scum.” Cara becomes increasingly fascinated with the lambdas; meanwhile, the police experiment with a mysterious data processing entity; Cara’s mother interacts with an avatar of her missing husband; and Cara finds herself frustrated at the relationship between her boyfriend and her sentient toothbrush. The novel has an inventive structure, with narrative chapters interspersed with various documents; it can be exhausting, but the reader gets the feeling that’s by design. As weird as the novel sounds, it’s even more so, but Musgrave manages to hold all the threads together, although he does offer readers a healthy number of red herrings and blind alleys. The book is cinematic in an almost Cronenberg-ian way, and even at its most confusing, it’s still a fast-paced (though unsettling) read. Novels like this don’t work unless the author fully commits, and Musgrave does. This isn’t for everybody, but science-fiction readers who favor the bizarre will likely be confused and charmed in equal parts.
An odd novel that shouldn't work but somehow does.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-764-8
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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