Bracing, guilt-haunted SF-noir set against the timely backdrop of a politically divided America.
In Eadington’s speculative novel, a former National Guardsman traumatized by politically motivated violence and civil conflict learns his memories may be deceptive implants.
The story begins in 2048, in the aftermath of several years (a period called “the Lapse”) of right-wing violence and reactionary terrorism perpetrated by fundamentalist Christian militias and anti-immigrant “patriots” that tore the United States apart. Pete Bascom is a former National Guardsman in California who is traumatized by physical and psychological wounds and works in a government department devoted to victim Redress and Reparations as society recovers. Suddenly, however, the program is discontinued, leaving Pete without a cause until he overhears another ex-Guardsman’s boasts about his past; the man’s history is identical to Bascom’s. Pete is forced to consider the possibility that his memories are not his own, but rather some kind of advanced neural transplant that has successfully repressed his origins. He learns that he may actually be Jacob Leiter, an unsavory character of the bygone era who was hip-deep in the realms of pornography, sex work, and political extremism. Every thread the hero follows on his private inquest deeper into California’s ugly underground leads to more stonewalling and evasion (even by those closest to him, like a part-time lover), and there are threats from especially menacing characters warning him to leave things from the bad old days alone. The Philip K. Dick-like premise of scrambled identity in a futurescape of disquiet and deceit is effectively rendered in an arid, noirish fashion that may remind readers of the classic film Chinatown (the use of the name “Jake” and the ways in which the West Coast water supply figures into the plot further cement the comparison). As in Dick’s work, absolute truth and full closure elude the protagonist; via scraps and oblique references, readers get a fragmentary picture of the fateful 21st-century awfulness between red and blue states (“I can call the mid-30s what they were. People were shooting each other, bombing each other. Chrissakes, thousands of people died in the Battle of Akron. That’s a war”).
Bracing, guilt-haunted SF-noir set against the timely backdrop of a politically divided America.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2025
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
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