An engaging, post-apocalyptic, collapse-of-everything narrative that emphasizes character relations more than action.
Following a pandemic, an Oregon college student crosses a mostly deserted (but dangerous) America in search of her ex-lover, the estranged son of a wealthy man.
Dean offers this second installment in his Thermals of Time trilogy of post-apocalyptic adventure/drama. The first, Scream of an Eagle (2020), centered on James Mendez, the college-age son of mega-billionaire Robert Mendez, an offstage but evidently disagreeable tycoon whose Allpro food monopoly controlled a dysfunctional America of the 2030s. Things went completely to pieces with the combination of a violent uprising by embedded White supremacists in the United States military and a horrific “V-1” virus that killed millions, but which seemed to leave proportionally twice as many women as men alive. While James was last shown bereft at a homestead at the end of the previous book, this sequel opens with Anna Duran, his childhood sweetheart of mixed Native American blood, whom he was forced to abandon by his elitist dad. She is at college in Oregon when the V-1 virus hits and quickly kills her live-in fiance and most of the rest of the populace. Apparently lucky enough to have immunity, Anna begins a trek throughout the American West in hopes of somehow reuniting with James, meeting other pockets of survivors along the way. Unfortunately, gangs of bad guys from the extreme right have also lived through the catastrophe and, under a “New Army of God” banner, plan their own slave-culture nation in imitation of the old Confederacy. Anna is captured and suffers grievously. Throughout this corpse-strewn landscape of Montana, Idaho, and Colorado, branches of a new “Modern Times Church” now sprout up with their distinctive symbol of three black crosses, representing the mysterious “Mystic Martin,” who supposedly prophesied all of this. But are they benevolent or another cabal of murderous racists? Dean’s intriguing, character-driven story is very much a middle chapter of the SF saga, with players and themes introduced that seem destined only to pay off in the next installment. The plain-talk narrative still moves along at a steady pace, and Anna provides readers with a sympathetic, resilient hero (one of several, it turns out) weighing options of how to continue in a world that is much changed and, potentially, has no future in it for humankind. By the cliffhanger ending, the stakes on everything have been raised.
An engaging, post-apocalyptic, collapse-of-everything narrative that emphasizes character relations more than action.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73467-462-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: The Last Ditch Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times.
Amid the dystopian collapse of the near future, a musician embarks on a quixotic voyage from the shore of Lake Superior.
There’s both a playfulness and a seriousness of purpose to the latest from the Minnesota novelist, a spirit of whimsy that keeps hope flickering even in times of darkest despair. Things have gone dangerously dark along the North Shore, and likely for the country as a whole. A comet is coming that augurs ill, a pandemic has wreaked havoc with the public health, an autocratic despot and raging populism have made books and booksellers all but treasonous. There are corpses floating in the lake from climate change, and there are numerous instances of people swallowing something that kills them; the dead are generally considered seekers of whatever comes next (which has to be better than this) rather than suicides. As narrator Rainy sets the scene, “The world was so old and exhausted that many now saw it as a dying great-grand on a surgical table, body decaying from use and neglect, mind fading down to a glow.” Rainy is a bass player in bar bands, a jack of a variety of trades, and devoted husband to Lark, a bibliophile who runs the local bookstore. Before the collapse of the publishing industry, a cult author had been set to publish a volume with the same title as this novel, and finding one of the few advance copies has been like a holy grail for Lark. Then a copy finds her, courtesy of a fugitive pursued by the powers that be, and whatever tranquility Lark and Rainy had achieved is shattered. Rainy takes to the lake to escape the fugitive’s pursuers and reunite with Lark. He experiences a variety of hardship, challenge, and adventure, yet somehow lives to tell the tale that is this novel.
The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780802162939
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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