Sometimes-compelling but uneven tales of kings, pagans, and aliens.
The fifth entry in an ongoing SF series with the survival of humanity at stake, set in medieval England.
In fifth-century Britain, a local Briton named Melchior and his family have barely survived an Anglo-Saxon invasion and the loss of his lands and privileged position. He’s a man of letters and a Christian in a land of pagans, and he struggles to keep his family safe—especially his daughter Adele, whose marriage prospects dwindle as she grows older. When his neighbor’s wife is murdered and Melchior’s son Wilfred is falsely accused of the crime, Melchior sees a chain of events unfold that will unveil dangerous secrets long kept, lead to violent deaths and bloodthirsty revenge, and possibly even decide the future of humankind. As these events take place, the Inter-Alien Alliance sends a large team of Guardian observers to Earth to follow members of a “Mystery Race” who are set on conquering the planet. This latest installment of Frailey’s OldEarth series features a stand-alone plotline that follows Melchior and his family as well as an ongoing arc concerning the numerous extraterrestrial characters. These disparate elements don’t quite mesh, and the events that take place in the SF chapters are comparatively jarring and confusingly obscure, focused on interpersonal dynamics of characters who aren’t well developed. They also take readers away from the genuinely engaging story unfolding in England. Indeed, the self-contained historical storyline is a remarkably effective mix of bittersweet romance and murder mystery—one that also examines the dynamics of politics and power as well as cultural conflicts between pagans and Christians, Anglo-Saxons and Britons, and landowners and workers. It does it all via the personal perspectives of a family of intriguing, earnest characters. Later chapters, however, abruptly jump ahead months and then years, making the pacing uneven and the SF plot feel extraneous. The alien elements, however, may appeal to those who are deeply familiar with previous entries in the series.
Sometimes-compelling but uneven tales of kings, pagans, and aliens.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73239-525-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: A. K. Frailey
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2021
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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