Effective as metaphor but mostly ass-kicking, mind-bending entertainment.
What if it were possible to inhabit different versions of yourself in different realities? Beukes explores the scientific and ethical ramifications—with a healthy dose of speculative horror.
Cleaning out her estranged mother's house after she dies, Bridget Kittinger-Harris finds a horrifying husk she recognizes as “the dreamworm,” sparking memories from her childhood of strange adventures and her neuroscientist mother’s odd, sometimes dangerously neglectful behavior. She immediately swallows a strand and soon finds herself inside another Bridget in another universe. Meanwhile, that alternative Bridget wakes up inside the original Bridge’s body, and chaos and near violence ensue. Once order has been restored, it’s clear that Bridge’s mother, Jo, was up to something—probably the permanent relocation of her own consciousness into some other world’s version of herself, so Bridge will be able to find her and they will be reunited. Thus begins a weird treasure hunt as Bridge uses strands of the dreamworm to travel from body to body while her friend Dom reads Jo’s journals, reaches out to a musician and a neuroscientist for help, and babysits all the other Bridges as they turn up, confused, out of their own realities. Meanwhile, a woman named Amber and her cuddly dog, Mr. Floof II, seek to eradicate anyone who’s infested by the dreamworm threads. The worldbuilding here is skillful, as is the pacing—Beukes avoids dropping anvil-like plot points or world details, trusting the reader to unpack clues and read between the lines. Bridge’s world is not our own, featuring something called Lifebook instead of Facebook and a pandemic faced by a President Harris rather than Trump and/or Biden, but the differences are subtle enough that we can believe there really might be an infinite number of universes, and selves, out there somewhere. And maybe grief itself, Beukes suggests on a deeper level, is strong enough to alter space and time.
Effective as metaphor but mostly ass-kicking, mind-bending entertainment.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780316267885
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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
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