An often thrilling tale of an unpredictable future.
In Harris’ SF novel, a doctor’s psychological evaluation of an unusual patient could doom the planet.
Ernest Kairos is asked by one of his hospital’s emergency-room physicians to engage with a newer patient to see if they warrant continuing an involuntary psych hold. Irisa Solovyov, who prefers to be called “Iris,” is a 20-year-old college student studying computational neuroscience; she came in recovering from a drug-induced hallucination that appears to involve delusional thinking, which is Kairos’ field of expertise. Kairos promises to call off the hold if she tells him the full story of her vision—and it’s unlike anything he’d ever heard from other patients. He listens to Iris’ tales and secretly records them; first, he hears about her apparent visions of past lives, in which she was a young Italian woman in the 1960s or an Egyptian boy playing an ancient board game, among others. She found a shaman to help her guide her mental travels, but after drinking a hallucinogenic drink, she found herself inhabiting in the body of a strange, “human-esque” but clearly inhuman creature in the future; unlike her previous visions, this time she was stuck, and couldn’t return to her own time or body. After a few days as a weird, gray worker among many others, the creature Iris inhabits was taken by its gods to another place she could never have predicted—and where she encounters a very strange companion, indeed. Harris’ offbeat work of speculative fiction is told mainly through transcripts of Kairos’ audio files. Its vision of the future is an unusual one that’s both plausible and horrifying, and readers will certainly find it unforgettable. The work features some stunning worldbuilding along the way, and readers will feel as misplaced, and as entranced, as Iris does in her vision. None of the major players in the narrative are particularly likable, as their flaws are always on clear display; however, this has the effect of making them feel all the more genuine—and, ultimately, all the more human.
An often thrilling tale of an unpredictable future.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798891326217
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.
A 16-year-old savant uses his Groundhog Day gift to solve his grandfather’s murder.
Nishizawa’s compulsively readable puzzle opens with the discovery of the victim, patriarch Reijiro Fuchigami, sprawled on a futon in the attic of his elegant mansion, where his family has gathered for a consequential announcement about his estate. The weapon seems to be a copper vase lying nearby. Given this setup, the novel might have proceeded as a traditional whodunit but for two delightful features. The first is the ebullient narration of Fuchigami’s youngest grandson, Hisataro, thrust into the role of an investigator with more dedication than finesse. The second is Nishizawa’s clever premise: The 16-year-old Hisataro has lived ever since birth with a condition that occasionally has him falling into a time loop that he calls "the Trap," replaying the same 24 hours of his life exactly nine times before moving on. And, of course, the murder takes place on the first day of one of these loops. Can he solve the murder before the cycle is played out? His initial strategies—never leaving his grandfather’s side, focusing on specific suspects, hiding in order to observe them all—fall frustratingly short. Hisataro’s comical anxiety rises with every failed attempt to identify the culprit. It’s only when he steps back and examines all the evidence that he discovers the solution. First published in 1995, this is the first of Nishizawa’s novels to be translated into English. As for Hisataro, he ultimately concludes that his condition is not a burden but a gift: “Time’s spiral never ends.”
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781805335436
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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