Surreal and hallucinatory spiritual SF that some readers may find baffling.
In Walker’s SF/fantasy novel, a 102-year-old recluse in the late 21st century is rejuvenated during a visit from a space alien and then embarks on a time/space odyssey.
In late 21st-century rural Colorado, in an America that’s apparently become a police state, elderly narrator Will Henry lives alone in the forest with his faithful dog. He tells his mystery audience (named Theophilus) how he’d just typed out a final manuscript and looked forward to little but death when an extraordinary event occurred: A “wagon wheel”spacecraft descended containing a humanoid creature with translucent skin and ribbons of subcutaneous color. Contact with the entity restores Henry to his bloom of youth, but it also brings police, so Will, his dog, and the extraterrestrial flee as the cabin is riddled with gunfire. Will learns that his visitor, named Axzum, comes from a breathtaking world called Payraydayzay “boasting every imaginable hue, prompting the onlooker to explore every mountain, canyon, and crevasse.” It once orbited between Mars and Jupiter until a galactic menace corrupted its core and shattered it into pieces, some of which pelted archaic Earth (aka Gaieos), causing mass extinctions. More revelations come after Will discovers that he’s originally of Payraydayzay descent (before several reincarnations); his actual name is Oakruum, and he’s Axzum’s brother.In the wagon-wheel ship, Will zooms to Iowa for a reunion with his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Madeline, who, in truth, is Juulez—another survivor of the Payraydayzay diaspora. Axzum takes them along with him on a time/space distorting mission to recover his own missing mate and daughter. Soon, Will is left to deal with recovered memories, helpful orbs, and an Ethiopian “angel,” as well as sundry other figures and stranded wagon-wheel ships during his journey to find his cosmic selfhood.
Walker’s book is SF as mysticism, tilting heavily toward a Hindu-Buddhism philosophy (“Atman is Brahman” becomes a refrain) as it argues that everything in the outward world is an illusion and that the Universe, including God, lies within every living being. Wickedness deceives people into not knowing one’s true nature, and religion is called out as a particularly detrimental force, due to its false threats of devils and demons. However, the tale does feature a clear antagonist: a rapacious, anti-everything entity called the Nuul, whose hordes tore Payraydayzay apart at the seams. Readers may or may not absorb how it all turns out in the end, due to the narrative’s mind-addling journeys through portals, shape-shifts, and orb-hunting in extreme environments. However, Walker effectively makes scattered attempts to bring the careening voyage down to Earth at times with references to real-life people and things, such as Galileo Galilei, Vincent Van Gogh, and the historic and untranslatable museum curio called the Voynich Manuscript, which, in this story, was written in Payraydayzay. Readers who are familiar with David Lindsay’s classic of SF eschatology, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), may know what to expect when they punch a ticket for the Payraydayzay express.
Surreal and hallucinatory spiritual SF that some readers may find baffling.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9798879211573
Page Count: 324
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2024
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 beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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