Mostly suited for horror fans with an interest in real-life serial killers and with exceptionally strong stomachs.
A former Black Ops soldier with a troubled history is called in after a deranged geneticist creates multiple clones of famous serial killers and then releases them into the world.
When a group of six teens commit several ghastly murders while escaping from a facility for troubled boys attached to DSTI, a biotech company with ties to the military, Shawn Castillo is called in. It’s his first assignment after entering the civilian world following a long career of nasty covert work in the Middle East. Castillo soon learns that the kids are more than just troubled: They’re all perfect genetic clones of notorious serial killers. Sensing that the staff at the facility isn’t telling him the whole story, Castillo enters the home of Dr. Gregory Jacobson, the founder of DSTI who is also missing, where he discovers evidence of sadistic experiments being performed on the boys, and other boys, by foster parents selected and paid by DSTI, seemingly to help turn the boys into killers, just like their genetic predecessors. In the house, he also finds Jeffrey, Jacobson’s adopted son, a bright, quiet young man who happens to be a clone of Jeffrey Dahmer. Knowing that Jeffery will likely be “neutralized” if DSTI finds him, Castillo reluctantly brings the boy with him as he sets out to find the escaped clones and bring their inevitable murder spree to an end. But Castillo soon realizes that his boss may have ulterior motives, most likely trying to keep a secret involving a place called SharDhara, where apparently something unspeakably terrible happened, so Castillo has to set everything right before he himself becomes a liability. With a majority of the horrific acts depicted in gory detail, including thrill murder, rape, torture, necrophilia, etc., committed by and upon teens and young children, this book isn’t for every horror fan. The prose is clean and competent, but the dialogue is awkward. The characters, especially Castillo, are paper thin, but readers looking for a sadistic thrill will hardly notice.
Mostly suited for horror fans with an interest in real-life serial killers and with exceptionally strong stomachs.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0404-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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