An epic, vivid, and gory SF revenge tale with graphic-novel undertones.
In this SF novel, two brothers of vastly different temperaments must fight to liberate their race from merciless alien enslavers.
The peaceful, blue-furred numah are enslaved on Neos, a moon that can no longer be called a moon given the destruction of its planet by the Arbitrators, an all-powerful celestial race. Under the oversight of the physically dominant, bloodthirsty olokun, they work in the mines, digging up aegis ore to construct a giant shield in space. Some among the numah dream of rebellion. Others, like Yoto, seek merely to survive and so allow themselves to become complicit in their overlords’ cruelties. But Yoto, for all his cowardice, is destined for greater things. Though it is his heroic brother, Eon, who is singled out by the alien witch Lagaia to wield a dagger that will overthrow the olokun and maybe the Arbitrators, it is Yoto who becomes entangled with the weapon. It transforms him into a creature of gargantuan size and strength (“He drew energy from within himself and Neos”)—formidable enough, perhaps, to do battle with the vile Gen. Vega and his sadistic son, Cadoc. Can Yoto’s brutal retaliation lead to a better future, or will he cause Neos’ destruction? Viola, Acevedo, and Karpuk present an omniscient, past-tense narrative that focuses on action rather than the characters or setting—although SF elements like the olokun’s organic technology are present. The protagonists lack nuance, serving as archetypes of cowardice, heroism, and villainy. The dialogue, like the prose generally, tends to be workmanlike and aimed toward advancing the plot. The novel’s greatest strength lies in its epic nature. The authors linger over the numah’s subjugation and the olokun’s depravities, stoking readers’ desire for a turnabout. This comes amid setbacks and bloody losses playing out over hundreds of pages. The violence is extreme yet somewhat matter-of-fact in its presentation, as if begging for illustrations. (Indeed, there is a sense throughout of a story intended for adaptation into a manga or anime series.) The book is divided into six parts (plus an epilogue), each with a lurid, black-and-white frontispiece by Bendert. It concludes with full-page character pictures that emphasize the larger-than-life conflict. Fans of kaijin and kaiju media should approve.
An epic, vivid, and gory SF revenge tale with graphic-novel undertones.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986219448
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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