It’s no place for a picnic, but we’ll hope that Baggott moves on to making another world just as engaging as this one.
Fantasist Baggott (Fuse, 2013, etc.) wraps up her post-apocalyptic Pure Trilogy with an installment that will leave fans wanting more.
Baggott is a worldbuilder; she imagines settings on a grand scale, and it’s not pretty. It’s a time after the Detonations, when the One Percenters—well, the well-connected, anyway—get to live under the safety of the Dome while the rest get to live in something that resembles Bartertown in that Mad Max film, save that there are melting faces and nuclear sickness to attend to on top of resource shortages. Inside the Dome lives Partridge, who, part of the resistance to the new order, now finds himself in charge. (There’s a neat element of Greek tragedy in that development.) Is he going to continue the Purist apartheid? Once the new boss takes his seat, natch, it’s tempting to take up where the old boss left off. Meanwhile, quickly growing up outside is Pressia, a tough and resourceful young woman who, at the head of an interestingly motley band of fighters, is now stuck with a vexing question: Can she trust Partridge to live up to his ideals, or does she have to fight him too? Baggott blends the fantastic with plausible science—not just on the nasty effects of radiation, but also on the mechanics of gene splicing (in this case, to create a herd of attack boars, “engineered to be domesticated like cattle but vicious too”). It’s a hallmark of good fantasy writing that all the elements of the imagined world are at once believable and not quite like the world in which we live, and Baggott eminently succeeds. She also writes arrestingly, and if her story drags a little as she ties together the many loose ends, it’s worth the longueurs to find sentences such as these: “Pressia steps in through what was once the doorway, her boots crunching the broken glass. Its roof is gone, like a gaping maw over her head. The floor shines with dark puddles of rain.”
It’s no place for a picnic, but we’ll hope that Baggott moves on to making another world just as engaging as this one.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0302-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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