A bold, messy conflagration that revels in all of the trespasses and heroism of which only human beings are truly capable.
What’s black and white and red all over? This harrowing revenge piece that blends globalization anxiety and the Sino-American struggle for global dominance with acute violence and technology run amuck.
Debut creators Roman and DeWeese use the teachings of the ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu, as the foundation for an epic dystopian story of brotherly love and corporate greed set in a nightmarish American wasteland circa 2032. Our nominal hero, Kelly Roman, has come home from the military prison where he served time for a friendly-fire incident that has scarred him body and soul. Worse, Kelly discovers that his brother, Shane, has died in the service of a resurrected Sun Tzu, whose mastery of warfare now extends into a heavily armed global financial market controlled by his company, Trench. To get things started, Trench’s human resources manager neatly snips off Kelly’s hands just to prove that he won’t succumb in battle. (Lots of things get sewn back on in the future, apparently.) In Manhattan, Kelly mentors under Sun Tzu and clashes with the general’s daughter, Qing, all while maneuvering against a mysterious competitor, Vespoid, whose leader, The Prince, competes fiercely against Trench. There are also enough sci-fi high-concept ideas to fill a kitchen sink, from genetically-engineered soldiers to militarized black holes to the integration of insect biotech to produce more accurate algorithms. Much like James O’Barr’s bestselling graphic novel The Crow, the art here is purposefully rough, incendiary and ugly at times, with a provocative style that dares readers to keep flipping to the end. It would fit in well with the likes of Vertigo’s Army @ Love or even the black-and-white visions of Brian Michael Bendis’ Torso or Goldfish graphic novels, but there’s something about the immediacy and volume of the single narrative that lends this martial nightmare a little something extra.
A bold, messy conflagration that revels in all of the trespasses and heroism of which only human beings are truly capable.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-210394-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Ambitious, flawed, disturbing.
Kasischke (White Bird in a Blizzard, 1998, etc.) uses the random high-school massacres of the last few years as a taking-off point to compare the life of a typical teenaged girl with the adult self she becomes—or imagines she will.
In a high school in 2000, a boy on a shooting spree barges into the girls’ lavatory, where he presents the two friends inside with a choice of biblical proportion: Which girl should he kill? Born-again Maureen offers herself to save her best friend Diana while Diana hears herself ask him to shoot Maureen and let her live. From this moment, the story travels in time, back to the previous months when Diana and Maureen cemented their friendship and then forward to Diana’s idyllic future 20 years later. Married to a philosophy professor, living in a charming house with rockers on the front porch, and raising a lovable blond daughter, the grown-up Diana and her life are oddly bland—until, that is, the ominous pinpricks of darkness begin to accumulate rapidly: a cat resembling her own dead one appears suddenly in the kitchen; her daughter’s teacher suspects her of bad parenting; teenagers have sex in the neighbor’s pool; she sees her husband walking down the street with a pretty student whose hand lies provocatively in his back pocket. Is Diana’s life unraveling because of her guilt at sacrificing Maureen in order to survive? Or is Diana correct that her past has started “to bleed into the present”? As the adult Diana’s life becomes a nightmare, her teenaged self continues in a happily mindless drift—watching TV, flirting with boys, hanging out with Maureen—until the two selves converge with horrific violence. Unfortunately, there is a generic, overmanaged quality to Diana’s life as both teenager and woman. Although it packs a scary wallop, the novel is ultimately too self-conscious and contrived to be truly moving.
Ambitious, flawed, disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100888-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
Despite loopy plotting and an unresolved ending: a fun, breezy, suspenseful delight.
Flip, flashy series debut, starring beautiful, spunky, tough-talking and crack-shooting FBI agent Penelope “Poppy” Rice as a special investigator poking into miscarriages of justice.
Reviving a minor character from her most recent novel, Smith maintains the not-quite-over-the-top wackiness that made An American Killing (1999) so much fun. Agent Rice, having somehow straightened out the Bureau's infamously inept crime lab, is given permission by a grateful director to open up the old and certainly hopeless case of Texas axe murderer Rona Leigh Cooke, who is just days away from execution. Having found a written request for crime lab evidence that was mysteriously denied, Rice takes a second look at Cooke, a short, frail woman who claims to have found Jesus on death row and is currently a national celebrity as the first female to face execution in Texas in more than a century. Could such a woman, who weighed less than 100 pounds when arrested, have had the physical strength to wield a 25-pound ax and, with her ne’er-do-well husband at her side, butcher a man and woman caught in flagrante in a seedy Texas motel? The husband, having died in prison of AIDS, is no help. Rice sets off for Texas and, with the help of handsome but wary Texas Ranger Max Scruggs, as well as a Catholic cardinal hoping to gain publicity for counseling the woman on death row, finds herself hip-deep in gruff, steak-chomping, beer-guzzling blowhards, from Vernon Lacker, the squirming prison chaplain who has married the now-saintly Cooke, to the state's unnamed drunken good-old-boy governor, who refuses to delay the execution. Smith throws in a series of terrific plot twists as the unshakeable Rice finds herself the prisoner of a lunatic religious sect with the FBI at the gates, ready to do anything but the right thing to free her.
Despite loopy plotting and an unresolved ending: a fun, breezy, suspenseful delight.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6648-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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