An ambitious tale about a mysterious cruise ploddingly told.
A debut dystopian thriller explores a future ravaged by war and economic catastrophe.
Doyle Ramsey Beckett is laid off from his job as a history professor and anxious about his monetary prospects given the mountain of student debt he still carries. His wife, Geneva, is a medical doctor, but that doesn’t seem to mean much in a future America saddled with debt, hyperinflation, and chronic unemployment. Geneva reveals to Beckett that she’s pregnant—bittersweet news since they want a child, but this also creates a new layer of fiscal urgency. New legislation stipulates that a child can be seized by the government if the parents dip below a certain threshold of financial viability. Beckett decides to enlist to work on a controversial cruise line run by the government that promises to compensate him with reductions in his debt. But he is misled into believing the cruise he’s signed up for is a weeklong rehearsal for a job; it turns out to be the real deal—an 11-week trip. While onboard, he makes the acquaintance of a woman—Belinda Creighton—who was clearly duped into believing she was entering a rehab program, but the cruise certainly provides nothing of the sort. The entire plot moves slowly toward the revelation regarding the dark purpose of the voyage. Hoffman adroitly paints a bleak picture of a country shattered by internal discord; something akin to a civil war tears the nation apart in the year 2029. The result is a combination of martial law, Orwellian governmental control, and dire financial straits. The author doesn’t provide many specific details about the nature of the political tumult’s causes, but that only heightens the atmospheric ominousness. There are other subplots as well: a militia violently attacks Geneva’s housing complex, and a couple on the cruise grapple with terminal illness. But these are digressive distractions. Hoffman’s narrative ingenuity is impressive, and he exercises notable restraint in dispensing information to the reader. But a thriller should simply be more thrilling, and the cloud of mystery that hangs over the mission of the cruise remains more frustrating than suspenseful.
An ambitious tale about a mysterious cruise ploddingly told.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2016
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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