An engaging, pitch-black comedy of pathological horrors set in an alternative-future California.
A debut SF novel imagines a dystopian, authoritarian California where a survivor of childhood abuse is a celebrity on a reality TV show who flamboyantly assists suicides before studio audiences.
In Kerns’ imagining of a near-future/alternative history United States, the country collapses due to poor economic planning. California, which has sealed its borders off (especially from Mexico), becomes self-sufficient, albeit a dangerous, riot-torn autocracy, with most public sites converted into homeless camps. Golf still persists, as do an official state TV station and its proletarian programming. Capping S’ersis a cruel but popular reality show in which would-be suicides (s’ersas per newspeak) gain payouts for their families by being killed (capped) on-camera for cheering crowds via the unique talents of Ricky Fordham. She grew up in a dual-abuser household, under a cheating, churchgoing mother and a brute father who would rather Ricky had been a boy. Toying with an inexplicable family relic, a lightweight, star-shaped disc with sharp points, Ricky found her only bliss perfecting trick throws. Quite unintentionally, she revealed her airborne star could slice human throats with deadly accuracy. Thus (to pay for her twin sister’s medical treatments), Ricky becomes the main enabler of volunteers on Capping S’ers, though she secretly tries to give each victim a chance to relent and literally step back from death. The disaffected Ricky narrates this engrossing series opener, which offers a mildly Borges-ian SF social satire in savagely bleak hues, as each suicide candidate recites a litany of misery and willful self-destruction. Some characters may have reasons for their malaise; others are just Golden State airheads right out of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. Although Ricky finally rebels against televised evil (not necessarily as grandly as did Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games series), the bulk of the intriguing narrative—much like TV reruns—is a heavily ritualized affair. The dark tale proceeds episode by episode, using repetitious dialogue and a commercial-break structure, with some verbal zingers delivered by show emcee Phil Ebenezer (catchphrase: “I have a PhD in clinical psychology”) with sincere heartlessness.
An engaging, pitch-black comedy of pathological horrors set in an alternative-future California.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73271-010-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2022
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
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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