A rampantly over-the-top saga of vampire royalty, tyranny and treachery with bite.
A tormented teenage boy is both pawn and Messiah in the centuries-old feud between powerful vampire clans ruling the world.
Author and filmmaker Amaret forgoes half-measures in this global vampire epic. Human history has been shaped by the long-living nocturnal bloodsuckers, whose origins date back to ancient Atlantis (and, it’s unsubtly suggested, to aliens before that). Empires, corporations, religion, the media—the vampires control it all, and they’re violently rushing toward the apocalyptic culmination of their bloody, ancient battle. Julian, a smart, sensitive but disadvantaged Hispanic teen in modern-day New York City, is a “chosen one” type; after his single-mom’s scheduled slaying, he’s abducted into an elite “rookery” that schools potential young vampires for future domination. But inconsolable, suicidal Julian fails to realize how high the stakes are until it’s nearly too late. In the looming vamp-Armageddon, Julian gets an unlikely rescuer in the rebel retinue of Vlad Tepes—aka Dracula. There, the narrative takes one of its few deep breaths during Julian’s intense training. Like Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy—but without the apparent satirical bend—the story appears to occur on an alternate Earth where every conspiracy theory holds true: the Bermuda Triangle is a cloudy, quasi-military experiment; Queen Elizabeth II controls the illegal drug trade and had a hand in Princess Diana’s assassination; most Jews aren’t true Jews, but the real ones used the Holocaust to eradicate the false ones. Some amendments to reality are in questionable taste. Aside from the brooding, self-doubting hero, the rest of the predatory nosferatu ensemble all seem to come in two flavors—bad guys and really, really bad guys—each more sinister and brazenly sadistic than the last. Yet the sheer audacity of Amaret’s blood-soaked plotting carries the book, all the way to a climax hinting at a sequel stirring restlessly in the grave.
A rampantly over-the-top saga of vampire royalty, tyranny and treachery with bite.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983197195
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Creative House Int'l
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2012
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
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
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