Watching Paris burn is oddly sentimental, and the heroine has teeth, but by the end, it’s all just too exhausting.
In Reid’s debut horror novel, an unstable young woman gets in touch with her inner survivor—at the expense of the entire human population.
Jeanie has come to Paris with her best friend, Ben, to celebrate the New Year and a new beginning. She's mourning the recent death of her father and hopes her French friends will help her move on and embrace life. Instead, at midnight, the power goes out, and by morning, Paris is engulfed in a fiery apocalypse. Jeanie and her friends fight their way through the city trying to find salvation, along the way adopting an orphaned newborn who gives them hope and the strength to survive not only earthquakes, but also the mysterious moribund, undead vampiric creatures who feed on both emotions and human flesh. Reid makes liberal use of the end-of-chapter cliffhanger, and the novel moves compellingly at first, driven by the mystery of both the creatures and the origin of the devastation as well as graphic descriptions of Paris in flames. Ultimately, however, the story loses momentum and human interest. Reid’s thematic insistence on “fate” feels instead like “boredom” as each character meets his or her expected end. The end-of-world imagery (rising temperatures, etc.) and monster creepiness cancel each other out.
Watching Paris burn is oddly sentimental, and the heroine has teeth, but by the end, it’s all just too exhausting.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7314-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon451
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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 new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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