Sharp, unsettling tech satire elevated by varied and memorable illustrations.
An anthology of graphic shorts offers up chilling and sometimes-amusing examples of near-future tech gone awry.
The book collects the first five issues of Terrorbytes, with the first, third, and fifth written by Russell and drawn by Ruiz, Ponticelli, and Ferracci, respectively; the others are authored by London, with Ercolani or Halvorson providing art. The frame story opens on Earth about a century from now, with three android figures on a deserted planet activating old technology to reveal stories from the past. The first such tale, set in 2035, follows a charismatic tech bro named Ted pitching “Final Daze,” a new technology that allows the dying to relive their happiest memory, instead of living a painful present: “Let’s face it,” he tells a massive audience, “dying blows…But. It. Doesn’t. Have. To. Be. That. Way.” His exuberant presentation is intercut with grim glimpses of the disposable people used to test the tech. In the second story, someone named Tyler trains an artificial intelligence, sharing his personal data for money, only to develop a dependency that erodes his own grip on reality. A third tale follows a young man whose smart refrigerator informs him that he’s committed a crime; before he knows it, he’s sentenced and sent to jail. The fourth work also features tech entrepreneurs; this time, they have a bot that forces people to recite their thoughts. The fifth circles back to the spaceship that brought the initial androids, offering a haunting story of lost love at the end of the world. London and Russell seem to have drawn inspiration from the grim Netflix series Black Mirror, blending comedy with horror in technological futures that feel eerily plausible. The frame narrative feels rather thin until it gains clarity in the final section, but each story stands on its own as clever, unsettling, and fun. The various artists give each segment a distinct visual identity while maintaining cohesion in how they blend apocalyptic cyberpunk with the happy veneer of advertising; Ercolani’s bold colors and Ferracci’s surreal imagery, which features realistic-looking human heads attacked by scorpions, are especially hard to forget.
Sharp, unsettling tech satire elevated by varied and memorable illustrations.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781545826591
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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