A wickedly entertaining but also grotesque teen nightmare that’s pretty much Stranger Things meets Rogue One.
Weirdness invades a small Oregon town as a government experiment gone wrong escapes containment.
Where to start with the pop-culture influences that erupt in this second novel by Johnson, author of the novel Skullcrack City (2015) and the story collection Entropy in Bloom (2017)? It opens with a Goonies/Super 8 vibe: There's a bunch of high school misfits led by Lucy, a Peruvian adoptee whose closest friend is “Bucket” Marwani, whose Pakistani heritage makes him another brown kid targeted for abuse by their classmates. The nightmarish scenario goes all Stephen King’s Cell when one of the kids’ classmates goes berserk and kills a teacher before perishing himself. In the meantime, we’re getting broadcasts from the Nightwatchman, a self-styled radio shock jock pulling the curtain back on the utter weirdness erupting in Turner Falls, Oregon, á la Welcome to Night Vale. When things really kick off, it looks like a modernization of the townies-versus–rich-kids trope until the whole thing goes to hell and Lucy and her posse are just fighting for their lives. If you’re into this kind of thing, there are some carrots, like Lucy having her first kiss, which is kind of sweet, but as our heroes descend into the (inevitably) human-made nightmare, it gets pretty grotesque. Is there a secret laboratory? Check—in the supersecret IMTECH facility near our little village of idiots—making something that has gotten completely out of control. Lucy is a fierce protagonist, but from this point it evolves into a wetwork nightmare straight out of Chuck Wendig’s daydreams. There’s some prescient dark humor here, too: “Shoot, man. Maybe. That’s usually how it goes, right? But I don’t know about this situation. The whole city is on fire, man. I don’t think these guys are checking bank balances before they start murdering people. Could be the old rules, rich, poor, none of it means much anymore.”
A wickedly entertaining but also grotesque teen nightmare that’s pretty much Stranger Things meets Rogue One.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5429-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
