An amusing, imaginative read featuring a lovable furry critter with unique qualities.
People are mysteriously disappearing in Langston’s SF fantasy set in small-town Georgia.
It’s 1981, and Granville high school senior Denver Stow, school yearbook photographer, is having a very bad day. His girlfriend has broken up with him—a circumstance that, to him, confirms that he’s a loser. He seeks refuge in the woods behind his home, and as he sits by a tree, a gentle, soft-coated little animal appears; he has six legs, soulful eyes, and mysterious origins. He gently wraps his minklike body around Denver’s hand and sighs what sounds like the name “Zeke”; Denver describes it as “a quiet, breathy kind of voice that dwelt on the vowel sound. That clinched it; we were formally introduced.” Denver brings his new friend back to a building on his parents’ property that he’s been using as his darkroom and private residence. The story briefly backtracks a couple of months, setting the stage for what’s to follow; Denver is shooting photos of the senior class, including the girlfriend who’s yet to dump him, when the school bully and star of the high school football team, Burt Boeheim, goes missing. Police Det. Weiner sets his sights on Denver as a suspect, prompting Langston’s entertaining narrative to gain steam. While Denver is nursing his broken heart, he befriends a girl named Jinks, a shy high-school junior who, it turns out, is the only other person who’s seen Zeke, albeit briefly. This bond adds a sweet romantic element to the tale, counterbalancing the horror-tinged chills of the action scenes involving Zeke’s symbiotic partner—a carnivorous monster. The novel is populated with a diverse secondary cast that includes a plethora of dim and thuggish bad guys working for the mysterious Cossack, an evil gang leader who’s been terrorizing the town. Denver serves well as the pleasantly sarcastic, self-deprecating primary narrator, and although the novel isn’t quite tense enough to be a thriller, it is an enjoyable ride, with at least one incident that’s laugh-out-loud funny and a surprise denouement.
An amusing, imaginative read featuring a lovable furry critter with unique qualities.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2022
ISBN: 9781737823742
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Janda Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2022
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
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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