A challenging but absorbing introduction to a sci-fi series.
An apocalypse looms in this debut novel of crossed worlds and cataclysm.
Nine years ago, New Amith was locked in a space race with the Shan, an alien species of albinos. New Amith lost that competition, though not for want of technology. Their shuttle made it into orbit but came back with a corpse inside, a pattern that has since repeated three times. The cosmonauts never survive. Now, with dozens of Shan arriving on New Amith every day, the space program has been resurrected, and Nikos Healy’ll can only listen in from mission control as his wife, Elena, dies in turn. After the funeral, Nikos decides he wants answers. The rules of New Amith seem suddenly too great a burden; life itself has become futile. And so, with only his brother, Giannis, to hold him in check, Nikos sets out to uncover precisely why Elena was sent to burn in space. At the same time, he is reassigned to coordinate with Anna Antc’sh, the supervisor of a Shan archaeological dig. Together, they gain entry to the Black Room, from which they take away a shared nightmare and the conceptual key to deciphering the impending end of the world. In this first installment of a four-volume series, Park establishes a sci-fi scenario rich with half-familiar details: hydro-balloon trams; vaporizing toilets; gods, prophets, and ages of civilization (both past and foretold); intrigue and superstition. These elements are introduced via immersion, which on the one hand is disorienting yet on the other, makes a pleasant contrast to those novels that sag with exposition. The author places readers inside the story, come what may. The dialogue is naturalistic to the point of obfuscation, which adds to the sense of something being observed, not related. Nikos, likewise, is a complicated character: antagonistic toward his brother and abstruse in his interactions with Anna. The consequence of Park’s take-it-or-leave-it style is that New Amith emerges with a rich depth of history while the end of days plot, like a horror tale’s monster never fully revealed, is genuinely unsettling. Readers may not always know what’s going on, but they’ll definitely feel it.
A challenging but absorbing introduction to a sci-fi series.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Fox Point Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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