A cinematic, speculative exercise in which a ragtag band saves the world, kind of.
Waking up in a blighted, empty America, seven strangers unite to figure out what the hell just happened.
One of prolific SF author Doucette’s strengths is coming up with memorable inciting events, and while this story about the end of the world doesn't reach the heights of the best apocalypse fiction or even Hank Green's recent first-contact duology beginning with An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (2018), it's clever in inception and execution (though it doesn't quite stick the landing). We enter in Boston, circa sometime in the 21st century, depending on who you are. Robbie, a smart Harvard freshman who wants to be a writer but is doomed to be a CPA, wakes up with a killer hangover from last night’s kegger and...there’s no one around. Like, anywhere. Eventually he meets up with fellow student Carol, blind and fierce but missing her dog, and then five others. The first two-thirds of this eclectic novel is a survival story, somewhere between The Walking Dead and a Cory Doctorow thought exercise, albeit with no antagonists—yet. While Robbie becomes the nominal leader, it’s a true ensemble cast with a great collective of characters: There's Touré, a second-generation Mexican American coder; Bethany, a 13-year-old juvenile delinquent with more practical skills than almost anyone in the ragtag company; Win, an Olympic-level archer; Paul, a heavily armed ex-con–turned–traveling preacher; and Ananda, an MIT astrophysicist who thinks she might have an idea what’s happened. The titular band works together to find food and shelter, survive the bizarre weather, and attempt to figure out what the episodic flashes of light they dub the Shimmer mean, not to mention the date. Speculative fiction ranges from straightforward to bewildering, and Doucette covers the whole arc here. It would be a trespass to violate the reveal, after encounters with mutated coyotes, an alien who smells like pee, and a timey-wimey bargain for the fate of the human race, but it’s really fun to read.
A cinematic, speculative exercise in which a ragtag band saves the world, kind of.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-41894-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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