A pitch-black global thriller that is nevertheless supremely intimate.
This sci-fi novel pits humanity against an eerie, intractable threat.
Elise Broderick owns a flower shop in Glasgow, Scotland. At 41, she’s unmarried and has no children, but she does have parents who’d like her to move to Edinburgh with them. Yet she adores her bustling city and enjoys regular customers like Craig. One day, they discuss some trouble happening “Up North.” He tells her, “Best head out before things get hairy.” Elise does escape the rioting that engulfs Glasgow, eventually hearing the rumor that a chemical spill in the River Clyde has ignited nationwide chaos. But the spill is just a cover story, disinformation spread by someone like Robert Halifax, working in Washington, D.C., for physicist Lillian Tao. She directs a team of specialists studying the Front, a spherical, slowly spreading (at 0.2 mph) phenomenon that is, as far as anyone outside it can guess, 100 percent lethal to humans. It kills “along the same lines as advanced fungal decomposition of a corpse.” As the Front spreads from Oban, Scotland, it devours cities and nations, driving forth waves of confused refugees. Throughout the United States, the National Transport Agency controls mass hysteria using National Guardsmen like Dwight and Brad, who aren’t sure they’re ready to gun down those in need of food and shelter. Can Lillian halt the Front before humanity succumbs to its own most destructive urges? For readers who like their sci-fi unflinchingly nihilistic, Halpern (The Man Who Stands in Line, 2017) offers an eyes-on-the-ground document of how various stripes of people might spend their final moments. The narrative jumps back and forth among viewpoints staggered across the several years it takes the Front to cover the world. Elise’s chapters, for example, occur within the first 35 days of the phenomenon. This structure allows the author some perverse foreshadowing tricks, as when he introduces Chinese prisoner Yu Feng, whose chapters begin on “Day 730,” and then reveals through a Dwight chapter, “Day 844,” that the “Chinese had tied prisoners to posts to watch” the Front’s progress. Though reminiscent of patchwork narratives like World War Z that use gore to emphasize humanity’s struggle, Halpern’s work avoids gratuitous violence. The strength of this page-turning extinction event lies in the exposure of its characters’ darker selves. Elise, stripped of cleanliness and agency while detained in a camp, begins suffering flashes of xenophobia and thinks, “The more righteous you seemed, the more you secretly harbored racist thoughts.” Other hot-button topics under review are gun control, the bleakness of the internet, and the seriousness of murder as civilization crumbles. Learning what the Front actually is—the wrath of God or perhaps an alien cleansing mechanism—pales in comparison to the crucible it presents to humanity. The author proves excellent in laying bare the souls of Dwight, Lillian, and others. The final chapter, a rewind to “Day 0,” featuring a miserable couple on vacation, leaves readers much to ponder about the cause of humanity’s fall.
A pitch-black global thriller that is nevertheless supremely intimate.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Epsilon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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