A well-realized work of near-future fiction that echoes timely themes.
In Maristatter’s dystopian debut novel, a young woman seeks shelter from a theocratic American regime.
Meryn Flint is 18 years old, but she’s not legally allowed to move out of her parents’ house. According to the patriarchal laws of the Christian States of America, Meryn must wait until her stepfather, Ray Esselin, finds her a husband. However, when Ray, in a drunken rage, kills Meryn’s mother for burning some pork chops, Meryn must leave home for her own safety. When she does so, she steps into a world in which she has no rights and few people she can trust. The society is divided into multiple castes, and the most privileged take advantage of genetic engineering. Meryn, however, is a member of the Worker Caste with little hope of advancement. She can either marry her former boyfriend—the well-connected but violent Steffan Hagen—or go rogue and join the off-grid community of Tin Town, where widows and other outcasts build their own houses from scavenged materials. Meryn chooses the latter, and for once in her life, she feels part of a proper community. But will it be enough to keep her safe and free from men who would do her harm? Maristatter’s prose is urgent and imaginative over the course of this novel, and the dystopia it fleshes out is frightfully intricate. In this passage, for instance, Meryn walks through Tin Town for the first time: “The muddy board sidewalk beneath our feet ran the length of the town, its sections uneven and cracked….A door slammed, its metallic screech harsh in the morning air. I caught the reek of stale beer and ‘kitty,’ a synthetic (and illegal) khat drug popular with the Indigent Caste.” Readers will detect shades of such works as Margaret Atwood’s 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale and other works of feminist speculative fiction, and, much like the authors of those stories, Maristatter crafts a tale that’s as believable as it is disturbing. It isn’t always subtle, but it’s unquestionably immersive and memorably wrought.
A well-realized work of near-future fiction that echoes timely themes.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2022
ISBN: 9798986631110
Page Count: 342
Publisher: NiffyCat Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2022
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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