A pleasing pastiche of ’50s genre and anthology TV.
A small-town musician’s life gets exciting following the appearance of a stranger in this debut SF novella.
New Mexico, 1959. Fender Lee is a “master mechanic, guitar virtuoso and twenty-two year old ex-con” who works at the Last Chance service station in a small desert town. It isn’t as remote as it sounds. In the last year, Fender has waited on Howard Hughes and Johnny Cash, both of whom offered him jobs if he ever ends up leaving the station. But he would prefer not to move on so he can figure out a way to win the heart of Ruby, the waitress at the nearby Bluebird Diner. Then an odd, destructive storm rolls into town and, with it, an unusual visitor: a man from back East called Leon Green, who says he has come to “explore the desert” and “meet some Indians.” Fender soon forms a band with Leon and another friend, playing shows for the adoring teens at the Bluebird and finally gaining the attention of Ruby. Fender is concerned about incurring the wrath of Chigger, his rival for Ruby’s affections. But when Chigger suddenly disappears, it presents Fender with a new mystery to solve. Couey’s prose is neat and leisurely, capturing the rhythms of the small, mid-20th-century desert town: “On Saturday night, the crowd spills out the door. It looks like every teenager for fifty miles around has turned up. There is hardly room for anyone to move much less dance. Fender and Stringbean have a quick consultation then together start putting tables on top of others.” The author explains in her introductory note that the tale is inspired by the episodic television of the ’50s, and she manages to capture that feel exactly. The book’s novella length contributes to the sense of an enclosed story. The narrative is fairly episodic, but it picks up in the second half once the more speculative elements of the plot begin to emerge. Though rather straightforward in some ways, Fender’s tale should please those who share Couey’s nostalgia for an earlier era in American storytelling.
A pleasing pastiche of ’50s genre and anthology TV.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 33
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2023
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
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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