Well-written but can’t break free of its all-too-familiar tropes.
Ohman’s debut novel is set in Meritropolis, a walled city where every person lives at the mercy of the System, an algorithm that assigns each resident a number that determines their worth to society.
Teenage Charley has grown up in Meritropolis under the constant scrutiny of the System, which rules with an iron fist. When a citizen’s number drops below 50—as in the case of Charley’s older brother, who had Down syndrome—he or she is put outside the gates of the city, never to be seen again. The landscape outside is rife with murderous monsters: animal hybrids like the ferocious bion, a bull-lion combination, or rotthogs, Rottweiler-boar hybrids that are hunted for food. Charley, however, has an extremely high score, high enough to make him valuable, and he finds himself in the upper echelons of the System, groomed along with other high-scoring youth for a mysterious purpose. But Charley yearns for revenge—for his brother Alec and other innocents chosen for death by the relentless System—and he seeks to bring the System down from the inside. The novel is a clear attempt to join the wave of dystopia currently dominating the YA best-seller lists, and Ohman’s writing is a cut above: “The cork-gray, near-splintering steps accepted each of Charley’s strides with a ligneous grumble.” Unfortunately, he also seems to be assembling the plot from a list of well-worn clichés, starting with his hero: Charley is simply better than everybody at everything, which leaves him nowhere to grow as a character. From the outset, he’s clearly the chosen one to bring down the System, and the people he meets fall into simple roles: love interest, sidekick, nemesis, femme fatale who uses her sexuality as a weapon, etc. There’s also no sense that he was ever fooled by the System; his epiphanies about its corruption have already happened, and besides the faceless grunts he kills in his liberation quest, it seems everyone he meets has already decided the System is evil, which gives the entire book an odd feeling of anticlimax.
Well-written but can’t break free of its all-too-familiar tropes.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500189600
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2014
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 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
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