An undemanding human-versus-alien yarn with jarring elements of sexual assault.
A husband and wife already shaken by a worldwide seismic disaster find themselves abducted and exploited by a cruel alien empire in Lamar and Liana Golden’s SF novel.
Married couple Greg and Carla have their lives (along with their city) overturned in a global earthquake; Greg learns to survive and protect Carla in the broken, anarchic landscape. In a flash of light, they are transported to a distant world. Seized by sadistic soldiers (assisted by advanced humanoid “android” robots), Carla is repeatedly degraded and sexually violated in front of Greg, who is himself brutalized and enslaved. Their captors are from a vast empire waging war throughout the universe—the aliens are sterile and abduct victims from various planets to forcibly impregnate the females and then raise the male offspring as fresh troops. Carla becomes an unwilling breeder as an outraged Greg conspires with fellow slaves to learn the enemy’s technology in the hope of staging a revolt. The authors are a father-daughter team who have previously collaborated on child-friendly material such as Rika Saves a Cat (2023). Now, after penning some crime thrillers solo, Lamar Golden reteams with Liana Golden in this SF military-combat yarn, which falls on the grownup side of the ledger—though the grueling sexual violence at the outset thankfully yields to more generalized guerilla skirmishes and battles that are often related with journalistic detachment and generalizations (“The enemy pushed forward, closing the gap, but Greg’s team was well-coordinated, each move calculated to buy them more time”). The alien environments are not terribly exotic, and the nameless, all-powerful space conquerors are a thoroughly vile but otherwise nondescript bunch (one yearns for the pulpy color of, say, the troll-like Psychlos from L. Ron Hubbard’s superficially similar 1982 novel Battlefield Earth) who prove surprisingly vulnerable to ragtag resistance and DIY sabotage. A cliffhanger finale points straight to a sequel.
An undemanding human-versus-alien yarn with jarring elements of sexual assault.Pub Date: March 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781960976536
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Lamar Golden
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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