An engaging, if sometimes uncomfortably familiar, tale of pandemic survivors.
Survivors of a deadly global virus find one another and try to find a new home in Otero’s post-apocalyptic novel.
In the near future, a group of teenage girls forced to do manual labor at Real Impact—a boot camp for troubled youth in the Mexican desert—are largely cut off from the world. One day, one of the girls, Maggie, sees a car barrel through the camp’s fence; the driver jumps out and shoots the camp’s two sadistic taskmasters dead. The driver, Abigail, is the first outsider that the girls have seen in months, and she bears tragic news: “Everyone you know from back home is probably dead” due to a rampaging virus, Abigail says. “No. Definitely dead.” At the same time, a trio of motley travelers—30-somethings Warren and April and middle-aged Iraq War veteran Damian—are traveling on foot to San Diego, the next step on their journey to find April’s 10-year-old son, Valentino. Warren, a former history professor, is also trying to create a vaccine for the virus, using Damian and his dog as test subjects. When Damian overhears Warren’s plan, he runs off, leaving April and Warren to search the desolate landscape for him. In their travels, the two groups collide, and together, they just might be able to find some hope for humanity. In this fourth book in an ongoing series, following The Road (2020), Otero pens an exciting after-the-end story that, at some points, feels too real for comfort; its references to quarantining and mortality rates give this novel an eerily lifelike quality as it explores themes of survivalism, trauma, found families, and starting over. The overall structure of the narrative makes it feel a bit uneven at times, as the chapters from Maggie’s and Valentino’s third-person perspectives read more like a YA novel, while others read like fiction for adult audiences. Although it’s the fourth installment in its series, it can still be read as a stand-alone work, as the author does a fair job of covering the events of previous novels.
An engaging, if sometimes uncomfortably familiar, tale of pandemic survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986529219
Page Count: 429
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
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
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
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