If you want a hint of where Hrbek is going, thematically, with this story, look to the title of a short story collection...
In which unthinkable calamity propels a nation—and a family—into a rapidly imploding dystopia and slow-motion apocalypse.
It begins with what seems at first like a plane heading for the Golden Gate Bridge, except that it’s “too bright” to be a plane but more “like something cosmic come at high speed through the atmosphere.” Whatever it is, Skyler Wakefield, a 20-year-old college student and aspiring novelist, sees it shatter the bridge and bathe everything around it in near-blinding radioactive heat. Years after San Francisco and most of its inhabitants perish, America is a tense, fragmented society of colonies, territories, and prairie internment camps for Muslims. (Early reports alleged the words “Air Arabia” could be seen on the projectile that hit the bridge.) Skyler’s baby brother, Dorian, is 12 years old and haunted by dreams of a dead sister who the rest of his still-traumatized family insists never existed. Meanwhile, the family’s next-door neighbor, a 71-year-old veteran of something called Gulf War III, has made his way to one of the detention centers to adopt a Muslim orphan named Karim, who’s the same age as Dorian—who, as it happens, is cultivating a hard-core prejudice against Muslims. His impromptu expression of an ethnic slur at a backyard barbecue leads to a bloody fight between him and Karim. More grievances accumulate, leading to more bigotry and malign conspiracies on both sides of the American and Arab divide...and greater horrors to come. Hrbek’s (Destroy All Monsters, 2011, etc.) engagement with themes of loss and recovery and his vibrantly lyrical prose style reach a peak in this dark, allusive fantasy, which seems intended as a metaphor for the anxieties still lurking in our post–9/11 universe. As one of the book’s characters says, “What are we living in now, if not fear?” Which, as Hrbek implies (and FDR once famously proclaimed), may itself be a worse enemy than any other we can find, or contrive, for ourselves.
If you want a hint of where Hrbek is going, thematically, with this story, look to the title of a short story collection written about 80 years ago in an America far different from ours: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-453-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
