An uneven handful of mostly fantastic short fiction.
Maze presents a raft of speculative short stories and novellas.
This assemblage of speculative tales opens with “Blue Foot,” an environmentalist-themed SF novella about a grandmother named Ernestina and her grandson Ozzie who are cruelly expelled from their ancestral domed haven in an ostensibly eco-blighted future, sent into a dense jungle environment outside that’s reputedly filled with predators and dangers—and whatever remains of two other vast domed cities, which have mysteriously stopped communicating over time. What starts as an intriguing cli-fi premise ends rather abruptly, and readers will wish the tale had gone on. The collection is bookended by the opening chapters of a work-in-progress, Seed Rebels, an incipient YA series (much of this material reads as YA) set at the end of the 21st century, when asteroid bombardment threatens civilization—specifically, “Wind City” on the Great Lakes. Downtown media personality Athena receives advance warning and prepares transport that helps her to flee the worst of the destruction as she receives clues about her origins as an orphan in a farming culture that suffered cruelly in a previous generation’s pandemic. In between these stories are straight-out horror yarns (including “Detour,” in which a fountain of youth has grisly consequences, and the insect-fixated “The Regeneration of Tomas Renell”); even these stories don’t push the envelope much beyond YA boundaries. (“She backed away, jaw dropped, hands covering her screams as she tried to find the man she knew behind the grotesque, bulging eyes.”) Maze professes a fondness for the SF and horror genres borne of watching TV—everything from The Twilight Zone to local Illinois-broadcast horror hosts. This compilation of literary odds and ends will appeal to sympatico readers. Notes from the author follow each tale (in the case of some flash-fiction contest-entries, the commentary is longer than the stories themselves). The book suggests a rising young band’s EP—a fledgling sample of intriguing tracks that promises meatier stuff down the line.
An uneven handful of mostly fantastic short fiction.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781957944029
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Maze Publications
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2024
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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