An original, dark, and finely wrought debut fantasy novel.
A captive girl is forced to shepherd plague-stricken men through healing psychedelic trips in Losada’s novel.
For centuries, a deadly disease of unknown origins has “changed the course of history” and perpetuated the sale, kidnapping, and enslavement of countless girls. The disease only infects men, who are then called Blights, but it can be passed on to their Half-Blight children. While its full effects are only lightly sketched in the novel, it causes a pseudo-avian metamorphosis before death—beak and hind toes included. Only the Sonagachi tree’s bark, distilled into psychoactive SonaDrops, slows its progression. Distributed via the House Syndicate system and administered by “captive and caged” House Girls, the treatment causes the Blight and attendant Girl to fall into the same dream. Once connected, weeks or months of the Girl’s life are transferred to the Blight. The novel focuses on Ink, a “Top Floor Girl” who reads toBlights as they enter their dreams and has “abandoned pity somewhere beyond the walls of this place.” Resigned and weakening after years of House service, she schemes to blunt her fellow Girls’ suffering, scratches interesting words into her walls, and waits for the next man to pay “for [her] to read from a fat book of military history while he reaped the Sona’s benefits and stole months off [her] life.” One night, her world is turned upside down due to a strange artifact; instead of simply observing, she’s pulled into a Blight’s dream and takes his life force for her own. This tale of trauma, survival, and the choices people make under duress is stunningly written and deeply felt. The spare, effective worldbuilding is all the more effective for its slow unfolding. Losada’s poetic, erudite prose can be gorgeous in its own right, and it powerfully delivers the novel’s many emotional gut punches. Across the board, the characterization is masterful, with antiheroes and villains alike sketched with dexterity and depth. Impressively, even off-page characters become fully realized in others’ recollections.
An original, dark, and finely wrought debut fantasy novel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798897400249
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: today
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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