A future-set mystery in which gruesome description and twisty worldbuilding keep readers under siege.
A grieving officer goes hunting for her city’s long-held secrets in Little’s dystopian SF thriller.
In the distant future, the eerie, ultra-policed city of Coldgarden is under attack from all sides. The walls of the city, formerly known as Calgary, have been attacked for more than 90 years by revenants—“mutable, insectile” beings that also crawl in through Underguts, the tangle of tunnels that lie beneath the city. Real glass that can shatter is rare in Coldgarden, as even the slightest wound can trigger Mutagen Prime, a hypermutation that sends the body “spiraling off into biological madness,” growing excess bone and muscle at a gruesome, fatal rate. Iazmaena “Iaz” Delgassi, the newly elected Magistrate of the city’s Watchfire ward, is still celebrating her win when she finds her boyfriend, Damon, dead by apparent suicide in their apartment. Signs point to foul play engineered by Gene Sequencing, the all-powerful government body tasked with investigating Mutagen Prime. Iaz joins forces with her best friend, scientist Stefani Palmieri, as well as sketchy “data-jockey” Rieve Revolos and plucky, Underguts-savvy orphan Marri, to avenge Damon and uncover the truth. When Iaz is suddenly promoted to the mayoral position of acting archon, she’s uniquely positioned to pry into century-old secrets. Author Little spins a familiar SF conceit into an excellent hard-boiled detective novel, complete with a hard-drinking, morally gray former cop leading the pack. The characters are beloved archetypes that shine in this setting, where the seen and unseen terrors of Coldgarden are chillingly described: “The revenants boiled in, tearing through stubborn compglass like it was rotted cloth…. They rose like a surging tide, articulated gemstones of death.” This series debut reads like a sequel at times; readers are immediately plunged into the thick of ward-specific city politics, and events that precede the events of the book are excessively referenced one moment and forgotten the next. Genre-savvy readers will find the final plot twist predictable, but it delivers a clever heartbreak and clearly sets the scene for the trilogy’s remaining installments.
Pub Date: March 14, 2022
ISBN: 9781951445270
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Cursed Dragon Ship Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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