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 satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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
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