A consuming work of great unpredictability and power.
A suicidal man living through a global health crisis realizes he’s immortal in McCarty’s novel.
Louie lives in a tiny town in Northern Michigan and is considered by all, including himself, a lifelong loser. An out-of-work mechanic, he decides to kill himself, but he fails repeatedly; for reasons he cannot understand, he is immortal, a peculiar condition for a man who longs to end his own life. Even stranger is the fact that everyone else is dying—the world is engulfed by a flulike virus, a “biotic crisis” that’s mercilessly killing nearly every human in a mass extinction event, a horrifying catastrophe chillingly portrayed by the author. Eventually, Louie is the last surviving resident of his town, and he calls a newspaper to report it; this is how he meets Katherine, the woman who answers the phone and thereafter becomes the object of his dreams. She dreams of him, too, and she drives from New Jersey to Michigan to find him. Louie shares his bizarre secret with her and comes to believe she’s like him, incapable of death, and that they are meant to “rebuild the world as Adam and Eve.” This crumbling world is a dangerous place, however, and they’re threatened by another man with a different plan, a man who may also be immortal. This is not a formulaic apocalyptic novel—in fact, it’s surprisingly inventive and delightfully weird. Both Louie and Katherine are depicted in nuanced, even tender terms, two sad people who have both struggled with suicidal intentions. The story’s conclusion is a touch sentimental—the author can’t help but draw a banal therapeutic lesson from the tale—but that doesn’t ruin an otherwise refreshingly original novel that enchants even as it terrifies.
A consuming work of great unpredictability and power.Pub Date: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781941175026
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Crazy Pages
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A secret history that toys with the mythos of dark academia while reveling in its excesses.
What happens when students at a school for the paranormal decide that enough is enough?
Best known for video games, queer horror, and a collaboration with Richard Kadrey (The Dead Take the A Train, 2023), Khaw detours to visit an elite school and the damaged young adults it serves. At 21, Alessa Li wakes up with a start to find she’s been kidnapped from home in Montreal and apparently enrolled in college, simply because she’s incredibly dangerous. In fact, the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted is less an homage to Hogwarts than a gory rebuttal dressed in wizard’s robes. The story moves between two timelines; the first offers Alessa’s introduction to her creepy classmates, while the second finds them all under siege later in the titular library. “Appendage to the main campus, it acted only in the faculty’s interest, which seemed to revolve exclusively around fucking us students over,” Alessa explains. Among the 20-odd students, cult member Portia transmogrifies into some kind of insectoid critter every now and then; Eoan sacrifices himself by feeding his own body to the school’s ravenous hosts in order to protect his friends; Delilah is an “immortal sacrifice,” dying over and over again in the service of the gods; while Rowan is a “deathworker” whose destiny is foretold by prophecy. There are some intriguing elements—and it’s often hard to take. Like other postmodern antiheroines, among them Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black (Blackbirds, 2015, etc.) and Julie Crews from The Dead Take the A Train, Alessa’s primary operating mode is pretty much caustic bitch, and her classmates don’t temper it much. Whether the deadpan violence and body horror is excessive is a matter of personal taste, but there’s no denying that the whole thing is pretty squelchy and it’s not always easy to follow. Proceed with caution.
A secret history that toys with the mythos of dark academia while reveling in its excesses.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781250877819
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nightfire
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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