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THE SERPENT UNDERNEATH

A spirited cast brightens this gripping, densely packed dystopian tale.

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Fragoules’ debut SF novel spotlights remarkable individuals who fight totalitarian rule in a near-future world.

Eighteen-year-old Haven Segreti was born into a dystopian future America. It’s been two decades since a string of disasters—including starvation, disease, and economic collapse—ravaged the country. Haven works as an Assimilation Administrator in the New Republic, which comprises the territory east of the Mississippi River. She processes “outsiders” joining the New Republic’s walled cities. Living in these cities is the only way to get any assistance from a government that demands conformity. Haven considers this a draconian means to control its citizens, a belief that she shares with her charismatic team leader, Adrien Damaso. He’s also the person Haven suspects when someone brutally murders an administrative leader. In Texas, outside of the New Republic’s borders, Nathan Hambrice awakens from a 20-year coma to a “bizarre alternate world.” He’s just as shocked to learn that he has a son living in the east, a revelation that ultimately sends Nathan on a potentially dangerous journey. The author excels at worldbuilding. Front-loading the narrative with exposition gives the story an unrushed tempo; Fragoules favors character development over action, and she meticulously assembles a complex cast. Adrien, for one, is magnetic but unnerving, confessing, “Emotions are an intellectual curiosity for me. My joys come from…darker things.” There’s a propulsive narrative drive as Nathan goes after his son and Haven and her friends fight to free themselves of the New Republic’s authority. This novel, which rolls out a prospective series, leaves much to explore for sequels and hints at expansion, as the former United States isn’t the only region in turmoil.

A spirited cast brightens this gripping, densely packed dystopian tale.

Pub Date: April 4, 2023

ISBN: 9780998740355

Page Count: 308

Publisher: Bowker

Review Posted Online: April 12, 2023

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PHASE SIX

All the narrative propulsion of escapist fiction without the escape.

Paced like a prophetic thriller, this novel suggests that "pandemic" is a continuing series.

Shepard has frequently employed research as a foundation for his literary creations, but never before in such pulse-racing fashion. He's set this narrative in the near future, when the threat of Covid-19 has passed but provides a cautionary lesson. And what have we learned from it? Not enough, apparently, as an outbreak within an extremely isolated settlement of Greenland begins its viral spread around the globe. Readers will find themselves in territory that feels eerily familiar—panic, politics, uncertainty, fear, a resistance to quarantine, an overload of media noise—as Shepard's command of tone never lets the tension ease. Eleven-year-old Aleq somehow survives the initial outbreak, which takes the lives of everyone close to him, and he may provide the key to some resolution if anyone can get him to talk. The novel follows the boy and the pandemic from Greenland to a laboratory facility in Montana as, in little more than a month, the virus or whatever it is, spread by touching, traveling, breathing, has infected some 14 million around the world. Jeannine Dziri and Danice Torrone, a pair of young researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who have dubbed themselves the “Junior Certain Death Squad,” find themselves on the front lines as they attempt to balance personal relationships (which occasionally read like plot contrivances) with all-consuming professional responsibilities. Meanwhile, the pandemic proceeds relentlessly. “APOCALYPSE II?” screams a Fox graphic amid “the social media cacophony,” as mass hysteria shows how human nature can take a horrible situation and make it so much worse. And though the novel builds to a sort of redemption, it suggests that there will be no resolution to the current pandemic beyond nervous anticipation toward the ones to come. Channeling Pasteur, Shepard promises—or threatens—“It will always be the microbes that have the last word.”

All the narrative propulsion of escapist fiction without the escape.

Pub Date: May 18, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-525-65545-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021

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THE BOOK OF ELSEWHERE

A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.

In which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday.

“Memory is a labyrinth.” Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Miéville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter’s “weird fiction” subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He’s not nice: “That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone,” warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer—early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, “I kill and kill and kill again,” adding that he’d really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he’s not so much immortal as “infinitely mortal.” B, as one might imagine, isn’t the life of the party—and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly (“A gush of cream-­ and rust-­colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water”). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It’s not always easy to follow, but it’s clear that Reeves and Miéville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language (“the huff-­huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be”).

A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.

Pub Date: July 23, 2024

ISBN: 9780593446591

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Del Rey

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024

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