Clearly a series, with this opener hard to match.
Ridley abandons his stable of losers (The Drift, 2002, etc.) and creates a female cop in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles filled with psychic mutants.
You see, this is a Marvel comics graphic novel without the illustrations: a comic-strip sucking up the old flame-dripping images of Stan Lee and the gritty pages of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight whose Batman comes out of retirement at 52 to fight endless horrid mutants crawling through Gotham. Well, every night that Soledad O’Roark goes out with LAPD’s Mtac (Metanormal Tactical Unit), which keeps superhumans in check, there’s a one-in-four chance she won’t come back. Her first night out, her fellow officer Reese gets her chest holed open by flame lobbed by a fire mutant and loses a lung. Soledad’s .9 mm cartridges turn to slag before hitting the pyrokinetic and while her personally modified Metalstorm all-electronic handgun’s white-hot phosphorous bullets do rip up the pyro freak, Soledad herself takes some heavy burns. The horror in heat-fused San Francisco first produced the freaks, who include telepaths, telekinetics, invulnerables, intangibles, impenetrables, levitators, and metal morphs. Soledad’s gun, which fires rounds varied for each type of freak, earns her the nickname Bullet. But her modified Metalstorm can’t yet take out intangibles and telepaths. All this also offers Ridley a candy shop of comic-book villains and superheroes, such as the Human Torch, to rip off and revise as superfreaks with incredible powers. A geomagnetic mutie can move earth and rock, do low-grade terraforming. Freaks like Quadrupleman walk around veiled as normals, since the Prez has issued an Executive Order: leave or die. Some hit Europe, where they wear their costumes, do superhero shtick. First, Nightshift showed up, did wonders catching perps, but then supervillains bloomed to oppose him. Thrill Kill, Death Nell—and Bludlust, whose crazy megaweapon leveled San Francisco. Soledad’s big villain: the telepath, with whom there’s no defense—not when he’s her lover.
Clearly a series, with this opener hard to match.Pub Date: May 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53093-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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