A deep dive into prose-poetry sci-fi and a mind-stretching mystery.
On a vast, intrigue-ridden space station, an orphan becomes the lone survivor of a cosmic accident that may have left him partially possessed by an alien consciousness.
This novel’s setting is the Aggregate, a spacegoing future in which old Earth is a receding memory, nearly as mythical as the notion of “alien” intelligent races that human beings have, so far, not encountered. But on a giant space station/colony called Termagenti, gossip suggests an unclassified hunk of salvaged debris is indeed an alien vessel. A team of foolhardy station techs exploring the mothballed artifact is engulfed by an energy surge. The lone survivor, Jhinsei, an orphan, lands in the medlab, where he’s told his “blood chemistry is behaving—strangely.” He is suddenly no longer as alone as he used to be. Flickering mind fragments of his dead workmates now co-exist in him—along with another intruding presence (“Something was using his skin to feel the air, scent, see and hear everything, rising to it with wonder. Behind this whatever-it-was, Jhinsei was terrified and jittery as hell”). Meanwhile, more anomalous events (and sightings of a phantom figure in a glittering, birdlike costume) accompany what seems to be a conspiracy, tying religious fanatics to a reclusive, high-tech media mogul forcing the next step in human evolution. Reisman (The Z Radiant, 2013) takes the familiar sci-fi premise of “first contact” into the realm of surrealist poetry with her tale’s argot-infused text, melding clever word inventions with esoteric phraseology. At times, one suspects that a fairly simple, if actually underdeveloped, plotline abides beneath all the filigree, fabulist grammar, and dreamlike imagery (“The vanessa, highly illegal—thanks to the Thespis Guild— somatically modal flash analog as she was, lay sweet-skinned and languid, long limbs entangled with his”). But Reisman’s vision deftly invokes a remote culture and characters so extreme and exotically alluring that the concept of a wayward E.T. in this realm hardly makes a stir in the foliage. Newbies in Jedi pajamas be warned.
A deep dive into prose-poetry sci-fi and a mind-stretching mystery.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63023-033-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Arche Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2017
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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