Rollickingly inventive and often hilarious—but it seems at times like a skit that, perhaps in the wake of an atomic...
In a melting-pot society populated by the aliens and humans of 1950s space-invader movies, a brooding blue rebel with a giant brain grapples with prejudice and hormones in that most horrific of earthly battlegrounds—high school.
J!m, the hero of the second book (I Love You, Beth Cooper, 2007) by ex-Simpsons writer Doyle, is the son of the most despised and mythologized alien leader of all, a disarmament-preaching supervillain who’s said to have died years before, impaled on the Washington Monument. In the aftermath, J!m’s mom, sultry, downy-furred Miw, is making ends meet by serving cocktails to the kinky mutant-curious in a strip club. And tongue-tied J!m is infatuated with his lifelong human friend Marie, daughter of the neighborhood mad scientist, incompetent Dr. Rand, who is kvetched at constantly by his wife, a severed head who wants him to acquire for her the new body he’s promised for years. At Manhattan High (Go, Mutants!), J!m is besieged by sadistic coaches, skeptical teachers and well-connected bullies with fast cars and designs on his girlfriend. Meanwhile, human distrust and intolerance of the mutants in their midst is worsening, and all it will take to set off this powder keg is…well, the literally explosive changes that mark J!m’s puberty might just do it, in which case saving the day will be up to J!m and his friends—Johnny, a radioactive ape-boy rebel (and a football hero banned for his tendency to accidentally maim or dismember opponents while carrying the ball), and Jelly, a shape-shifting goo who usually takes the form of a fat kid who’s the brunt of jokes. Doyle provides a frenetic, sublimely silly, all-over-the-map mashup of B movies that’s also a sendup of American pop and political culture.
Rollickingly inventive and often hilarious—but it seems at times like a skit that, perhaps in the wake of an atomic accident, has mutated into (dear God!) an epic.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-168655-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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