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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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