Extraordinary and with a foreboding atmosphere that’s grim but never dreary.
Those cured of a devastating infection struggle to survive in a world that doesn’t consider them human in Stueve’s harrowing dystopian thriller.
Profine Pharmaceuticals may have saved humankind with Tetdat, the cure for a widespread infection that turned people into mindless beings who craved live meat. Billy Dodge is one of the cured, known as formers, who are housed in various Profine compounds to protect them from the masses of uninfected who still see them as diseased monsters. There are disastrous consequences when, one night, Billy storms out of a group-therapy session and leaves the facility. He and fellow former Nancy Shellborne have a confrontation with an uninfected that results in the man’s death. Enraged humans outside the compound cause pandemonium. This disturbing tale presents a bleak future in which individuals are still swayed by the media and mob mentality. It’s clear, for starters, that the infected are not monsters: the protagonist is a former, and Stueve (The ABCs of Dinkology: Time In-Between, 2014, etc.) rigorously avoids the Z-word. Billy, in his first-person narrative, persistently reminds himself that he’s alive. The pale-skinned man may be perpetually cold, but emotions like anger and fear, he believes, verify that he’s human. The media, meanwhile, discuss formers as separate entities from humans, implying that the name refers to a former state of humanity. “Oh society, will you ever change?” Billy laments, as reporters spin stories sympathizing with the dead man—though readers know he’d relentlessly beat Billy before a brick-wielding Nancy intervened. Stueve stays mostly in the present but maintains a riveting story by dropping hints of the 10-year Infection War (nuclear bombs in New York and London) and Billy’s pre-infection life (his newlywed wife and beloved dog are both dead). There’s violence, of course, but the author steers clear of visceral imagery, opting for darkly vivid prose, including the bloodshot-eyed formers crying “bloody tears.” Despite its focus on Billy, the novel, which clocks in at around 300 pages, has the emotional range and depth of a much longer epic tale.
Extraordinary and with a foreboding atmosphere that’s grim but never dreary.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: The Novel Fox
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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