A triumphant work from a unique visionary.
In Darrow’s SF novel, set 1,000 years in the future, society grapples with the implications of the “formerly dead” and the rising ghost-gig economy.
In 3025, the brilliant Yemi Callo has conquered both inconvenient amputations and death itself through the use of holographic prosthetics and a device called the Resurrection Engine. Earth is now known as Former-Earth, and the human diaspora has fanned out across seven moons following the great Exodus of 2001. A worlds-spanning governing body called the Lunar Council oversees it all…or at least attempts to. As fanciful as all that sounds, Darrow’s immersive worldbuilding and her consistently droll narrative convincingly transport readers to the far-flung future with the greatest of ease. Hildegard Doval, known as Hildy, is the unassuming protagonist who grounds the kaleidoscopic wonders flowing out of the author’s impressive imagination. Once an unremarkable librarian who died at the age of 32, the instantly relatable Hildy awakens to discover that she is the 7,412th specter to be brought back to life by the Resurrection Engine (the Lunar Council, citing “economic concerns” and “crimes against nature,” has put a cap on resurrections at 10,000). Hildy just wants a little love, and to remake the world so that specs like her are treated with a lot more dignity and respect. She wishes she were a more popular pick at Carlotta Sun’s Purgatory House, a kind of bordello where flesh-and-blood folks (and some ghosts) go to enjoy the company of strangers, but at least it’s a job that provides the dead with something resembling a real purpose. Not all the “formerly dead” agree with that view, however. “The Living are incapable of truly confronting death, so they infantilize us. You, like all our spectral brethren, have been conscripted into service to comfort and appease them,”the rebellious Captain Teodora Galán complains to Hildy’s much more popular pal, Eyvind. Beneath all the gauzy goings-on and miraculous tech unfolds a shadowy mystery involving an enigmatic entity known as the Graverobber whom Hildy and her close-knit group of friends must confront before their undead lives are further turned inside out. “Trippy” doesn’t begin to describe this wild yarn—it is truly inventive and fun.
A triumphant work from a unique visionary.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798347040063
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2026
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
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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