A bold, if somewhat uneven, speculative thriller that’s as ambitious as it is unpredictable.
A ragtag group of friends discovers that not everything is as it seems in Casamassina’s supernatural mystery with SF elements.
Mason Kowalski is stuck in a dead-end job he hates, writing copy for his boss at a health-food company while taking care of his elderly grandmother in his free time. He regularly experiences stress, due to a generalized anxiety disorder, but he becomes alarmed when he also suffers vivid hallucinations and debilitating headaches. When Mason’s boss confronts him about missing work, he experiences an episode that he accidentally captures on video—only to discover later that the recording lacks audio, aside from his own voice, which sounds as if he’s possessed: “the gruesome voice moans into his ears. Through lungs clogged with tar. Sick with infection. Steeped in nightmares.” Terrified, Mason confides in his best friend and neighbor, Cassy, but his life quickly unravels when he learns that his boss has been murdered—and that he’s the prime suspect. Later, Mason has another attack, during which he unwittingly forces the police to destroy evidence; he escapes custody, but he knows that the police will soon be on his trail. With no idea of how to prove his innocence, Mason, along with Cassy, turns to Rudy Davidson, a former Navy SEAL and current San Mateo police detective. Determined to understand Mason’s condition, the trio run experiments to identify its source to little avail; then Mason encounters a mysterious man with a “shadow” of his own. They soon learn the man has been investigating a suspected supernatural serial killer.
Casamassina, a novelist who’s best known for his work in video game journalism as a cofounder of IGN, crafts a fictional world that feels both cinematic and intimate. However, his ambitious blend of various genres and themes sometimes blurs the novel’s focus. His background in storytelling shines throughout; the novel offers a vivid sense of place and mostly tight plotting, and the brisk prose grounds the surreal narrative in believable rhythms of friendship. Mason is an endearing and sympathetic character whose struggles with anxiety feel authentic. Readers may wish for greater nuance in the supporting cast, though, as their archetypical portrayals sometimes reduce them to ideas, rather than fully realized individuals. The dialogue is punctuated by coarse and often vulgar language, which reinforces the story’s gritty atmosphere. The story, however, takes a drastic turn more than halfway through the novel, shifting from an urban supernatural mystery to a futuristic SF thriller—a lively but disorienting change that may not appeal to all readers. The narrative threads unravel toward the novel’s end in favor of an operatic showdown that will leave readers with more questions than answers. Still, the novel does effectively gesture toward social and ecological themes, depicting a world that’s truly damaged by human excess. These motifs, while fleeting, give the book a timely resonance that will appeal to fans of genre fiction that looks at contemporary issues through a fantastical lens.
A bold, if somewhat uneven, speculative thriller that’s as ambitious as it is unpredictable.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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