A snappy, often satisfying smirk-inducing alternative take on an infamous day in American history.
An alternate history of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Hupp’s debut novel opens in 1987 deep in an underground bunker which has housed several thousand Americans from a 1968 nuclear fallout (in the novel’s version of history, Kennedy wasn’t assassinated, and the United States and Russia unleashed nuclear arms against each other). Special Agent Wayne Bronson, now in his 40s after an adulthood spent mostly underground, is an expert marksman and close friend and mentor to Terry “Ratz” Ratzkowski, a young man who moved with his neurosurgeon father into the bunker when he was 3 years old. Together, the men are part of an elite group of special agents, and Wayne, their top marksman, is about to be given his dream assignment. A doctor in the bunker has recently discovered how to time travel: Swap the traveler’s consciousness into that of someone from the past who’s near death. Using this imperfect method, Wayne’s superior wants to send him into the consciousness of the soon-to-be-infamous Lee Harvey Oswald so that Wayne can assassinate President Kennedy and, they hope, prevent the mistakes that led to nuclear war in Kennedy’s second term. Wayne “arrive[s]” in 1963 just in time to regurgitate the pills from Oswald’s suicide attempt, and he sets about the work of his mission, though he makes time, of course, to meet a girl, the inimitable Carly Ferguson. If Hupp’s debut sounds like fun, that’s because it is. Despite a crowded field of JFK conspiracy works, Hupp’s angle adds something fresh to the subgenre of JFK-centered alternate fiction. Wayne, while maybe not a groundbreaking narrator, brings enough humor to the proceedings to keep readers entertained: “Was making new friends and going out for some beers really going to alter the timeline of civilization? Fuck that.” Hupp occasionally leans too heavily into referencing a historic event that hasn’t happened yet, only to mention it will occur later if the mission is successful, but one is apt to forgive him for having a little too much fun with this premise.
A snappy, often satisfying smirk-inducing alternative take on an infamous day in American history.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798218765286
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Symmetrical Press
Review Posted Online: today
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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