SF fans and pop-culture enthusiasts will find this witty and cerebral novel unputdownable.
Robinson’s novel follows a misfit group of adventurers as they’re forced to maneuver through a deadly labyrinth in order to save humankind from annihilation.
Silas Keene is a dishwasher at a hotel near the Grand Canyon. Originally from a small town in Maine, he’s attempting to start a new life after fleeing his difficult ex-girlfriend. After seeing a flyer promoting subjects like astral perception, telepathy, and clairvoyance, Silas—who can mentally see distant places via his ability to remote view—attends a meeting in a double-wide mobile home and is introduced to a small group of highly paranoid people interested in finding those with extrasensory abilities. Realizing they’re being followed by operatives from a mysterious agency, they quickly become entangled in a conspiracy that involves a strange man with red eyes (each with two pupils and two irises), an ancient labyrinth hidden at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and the looming end of the world. (“I’ve seen some shit that is making me reconsider the fundamental laws of reality,” Silas laments.) Robinson’s novel is a highly palatable mélange of SF thriller, mystery, and homage to nerd culture. The pacing is relentless, made even more breakneck by the author’s savvy use of bombshell statements at chapters’ ends. The action is fast and furious, with every chapter containing a jaw-dropping adventure. But the novel’s most notable feature is the deft character development—every member of the small cast is insightfully portrayed via spot-on dialogue. The author inundates readers with nerdom references, from Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru to The Walking Dead to Quantum Leap, and displays an irrepressible sense of humor throughout, which makes the narrative a delight to read (“I don’t know who replaced your hemorrhoid cream with ghost pepper sauce…”).
SF fans and pop-culture enthusiasts will find this witty and cerebral novel unputdownable.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798347012206
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
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