College professor Lyle Peripart, the descendant of American expatriates, tries to ignore the various Reichs that rule the world following the Axis victory in WWII over a century ago, until the powerful industrialist Geoffrey Iphwin, interested in Lyle’s clever statistical analyses, hires him. After the interview, he’s beaten and interrogated by the fearsome female Gestapo operative, Billie Beard—but her questions are baffling. Stranger still, it emerges that Lyle managed to be in two places at once: while he was being interviewed, he was also flying to Saigon with his fiancÇ, Helen Perdita. Shrugging, Lyle joins Helen in Saigon, where a fat German tourist tries to assassinate him. Helen, suddenly packing a pistol, blasts the assailant—who turns out to be Billie Beard! Moreover, Helen now denies she can shoot, and claims she saw Lyle killed. In the history she remembers, the Allies won WWII, but America lost a nuclear war in the 1980s. Confused? According to Iphwin, since the introduction of quantum computing devices, every time someone uses a phone, or switches on a computer, he or she jumps into another reality, of which there are an infinite number. Iphwin himself is a human avatar of a “cyberphage,” an artificial intelligence patrolling the realities as a sort of super System Administrator. Even more puzzling, America has disappeared from every reality: just trying to think about it causes pain and confusion. The cyberphage wants to know why. The opposition—Billie Beard is its avatar—is cleaning up the system by killing anyone who knows anything. Eventually, we learn why America disappeared and, disappointingly, how it all comes out. From the author of Earth Made of Glass (1998), etc, a virtuoso piece of probability-juggling that mostly adds up—until that dreadfully anticlimactic non-ending brings you back to, er, reality with a thump.
Pub Date: March 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86118-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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