An eclectic and engaging collection probing the silence on the other end of the line.
This genre-spanning anthology explores grief using antiquated telephone technology.
If you could call up the dead, what would you say? This book’s title references Itaru Sasaki’s wind phone, a conceptual sculpture that allows people to hold one-way conversations with the dead via an unconnected telephone booth. Versions of “the Phone” crop up in each of these stories, often appearing literally out of thin air: on a beach outside of a school for magic; in the corner of a supernatural customer service representative’s bedroom; in the middle of a Kyoto, Japan, railway station. The Phone is accompanied by a plaque with the inscription “For What Is Left Unsaid.” A woman, uncertain of how to raise an adoptee alone, uses the Phone to try to call his dead father, knowing he can't say anything back. A group of kids in Louisiana breaks into a local, abandoned house only to have the Phone follow them mysteriously from room to room. Two Martian colonists return to a mostly deserted Earth looking for male genetic material and encounter the Phone amid the rubble of civilization. These 28 stories by 20 authors crisscross genres, from satirical retellings of Greek myths to realistic, present-day stories and speculative works set on alien worlds. A few contributors are emerging authors, and there are some prolific writers of horror and fantasy represented, including Jonas Saul and Russell Nohelty. While a few of the tales are disappointingly straightforward, the anthology—edited by Komp—is admirably cohesive as a whole. The pieces are generally short, allowing readers to leap from premise to premise and genre to genre in the space of a few pages. With each appearance of the Phone, the object’s metaphorical weight grows heavier and heavier, and the myriad ways in which characters lose people—to accident, to Covid-19, to environmental collapse—accumulate at a frightening pace. More than the sum of its parts, the book works as a crowdsourced meditation on loss and loneliness in an era of instant connection.
An eclectic and engaging collection probing the silence on the other end of the line.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2021
ISBN: 9781088003442
Page Count: 294
Publisher: 3 Bird View
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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