Strong worldbuilding and characters ground an imaginative setting, creating a powerful series opener.
Death is neither the end of existence nor the beginning of clarity for a grieving widower who finds himself in a mysterious near utopia in this debut novel.
Marlin Hadder is dead and not particularly liking it. After a dreamlike encounter in which he seemingly repudiates a peaceful meeting with a “painfully beautiful” and powerful “iridescent figure” because of the Rage, a lifelong anger that he struggles to control, Hadder ends up in a city called Station, in a decrepit bar with the same name. The city is a marvel: All labor is done by humanoid manikins, and there are numerous entertainments and no aging or sickness. It seems like paradise, but Hadder has some key questions (“Could this strange city really prove a new beginning? Could it make him finally forget his old life that was lost in the wreckage? Is that what he needed? Is that what he really wanted?”). Several residents have queries of their own. The more he explores, the more he questions, especially regarding the enigmatic Creator of the city, Mister Rott, and the beings on the other side of Station’s border. Early writes with economy and punch, creating an unusual world with specificity and color while permitting many aspects to go unexplained for the moment, allowing for more particulars or mystery as the story demands. Hadder and the other humans of Station are painted in equally strong detail. Their strengths and flaws seem believable and lived in even as the stranger aspects of their reality—such as the lack of a sun, the inability to leave the city once one’s entered, even the nature of their continued existence—loom over the characters to various degrees, affecting their psychologies and philosophies in unexpected ways. Portraying a realm built from various pieces of the characters’ old world, the engrossing novel wears its numerous influences well, twirling aspects of Dante, Philip José Farmer, and Buddhist thought into the narrative without being ham-handed. Some readers may be surprised at where the last third of the book goes, given its tonal shift with respect to the previous pages, but this volume is only the first of a series. The author’s deft plotting and capable writing keep things together even while laying the groundwork for the tale’s continuation.
Strong worldbuilding and characters ground an imaginative setting, creating a powerful series opener.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73423-140-3
Page Count: 361
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2020
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
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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