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
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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