A rock novel that’s more DOA than DIY.
With local bands being shot down in seemingly random killings, musicians question their devotion to rock n’ roll.
The sophomore novel from Jackson (Mira Corpora, 2013) is a dazed and confused meander through the music scene of the small town of Arcadia in the wake of a series of murders. Our eye into the place is Xenie, a teenage singer with hidden gifts but one who is keeping some dark secrets. “Follow the trail of unused tickets,” compels the book, a series of random snapshots of disaffected characters reeling as bands start getting shot midperformance all over the country. After her boyfriend is killed, Xenie goes a little bit crazy. On the edge of unleashing her voice, she stumbles. “But this time, I didn’t feel inspired to even move my lips,” she says. “The power of music had been steadily disintegrating, and now I realized the remaining scraps had started to curdle....Maybe whatever infected the killers had also infected me.” Jackson portrays the motley scene of dive bars, drunken musicians, and punk ethos with a practiced eye, and his prose is linguistically nimble. But there’s an emptiness to this experimental novel which comes complete with a Side A and a Side B, two alternate versions of the same story. Not only does the book offer little in the way of resolution, the monotony of the characters makes them virtually interchangeable. Xenie tries to make an argument that these killings are meant to make the music matter again, but the story here argues the opposite, portraying the banality and futility of a dying scene. You can see where Jackson is going, whipping up an indie-influenced modern Singles, but there’s just no edge here. As Xenie ultimately learns, “Anybody can open their mouth...and sing a fucking song.”
A rock novel that’s more DOA than DIY.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-53766-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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