A grim but effective speculative thriller.
Following the trail of his kidnapped girlfriend, a young man tries to make sense of a collective trauma in Aegis’ SF novel.
Mason “Mace” Dunlow is employed as a “vaulter” in this novel’s near future, which means he spends his days watching old, out-of-context video footage that had once been uploaded to the internet. His society is attempting to salvage what it can from the days before the Great Distortion, a cataclysmic event a decade prior when all technology that relied on wireless data was destroyed. Little is known about why or how it happened—only that an enigmatic figure known as the Omnipath was behind it. Mace and his fellow vaulters, including his girlfriend, Kiersten Frey, are engaged with the past but unable to derive any larger sense or meaning from it. However, when two men kidnap Kiersten and burn Mace’s workplace down, he’s propelled into a violent reckoning with history. After stumbling on to a mysterious device that gives him access to other people’s memories, Mace comes into contact with characters who were, in various ways, involved in the Great Distortion. While trying to find Kiersten and get the answers he needs, he vividly experiences their most formative life events—which, in this book, are very often their most damaging. This novel’s use of a girlfriend as a MacGuffin feels a bit heavy on the machismo, and there are occasional moments of excessive exposition over the course of the story. On the whole, however, Aegis has constructed a compelling novel that’s also quite timely, with themes that touch on the development of potentially corrupting dependence on technology, the very human need to make sense of traumatic events, and the complications that can arise from taking on new perspectives that are different from one’s own. Overall, the book manages to be serious and engaging while maintaining a consistently brisk pace.
A grim but effective speculative thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-69-830938-3
Page Count: 475
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.
The world as we know it ended in Wanderers, Wendig’s 2019 bestseller. Now what?
A sequel to a pandemic novel written during an actual pandemic sounds pretty intense, and this one doesn’t disappoint, heightened by its author’s deft narrative skills, killer cliffhangers, and a not inconsiderable amount of bloodletting. To recap: A plague called White Mask decimated humanity, with a relative handful saved by a powerful AI called Black Swan that herded this hypnotized flock to Ouray, Colorado. Among the survivors are Benji Ray, a scientist formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Shana Stewart, who is pregnant and the reluctant custodian of the evolving AI (via nanobots, natch); Sheriff Marcy Reyes; and pastor Matthew Bird. In Middle America, President Ed Creel, a murdering, bigoted, bullying Trump clone, raises his own army of scumbags to fight what remains of the culture wars. When Black Swan kidnaps Shana’s child, she and Benji set off on another cross-country quest to find a way to save him. On their way to CDC headquarters, they pick up hilariously foulmouthed rock god Pete Corley, back from delivering Willie Nelson’s guitar to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This novel is an overflowing font of treasures peppered with more than a few pointed barbs for any Christofacists or Nazis who might have wandered in by accident. Where Wanderers was about flight in the face of menace, this is an old-fashioned quest with a small band of noble heroes trying to save the world while a would-be tyrant gathers his forces. All those big beats, not least a cataclysmic showdown in Atlanta, are tempered by the book’s more intimate struggles, from Shana’s primal instinct to recover her boy to the grief Pete buries beneath levity to Matthew Bird’s near-constant grapple with guilt. It’s a lot to take in, but Pete’s ribald, bombastic humor as well as funny interstitials and epigraphs temper the horror within.
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-15877-7
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.
Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.
In her fourth novel, Mandel (The Lola Quartet, 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear, his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic—who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth—a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future.
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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