An ambitious and mostly successful sci-fi tale with a bit of social critique.
A thriller tells the story of an America rattled by a mysterious, technologically advanced group threatening to take over the country.
In the not-so-distant future—the Donald Trump administration is over and the video game “Half-Life 4” is about to be released—a cloaked figure appears on the floor of the Senate to offer a cryptic warning: “In one month, your ineffective order ends. In one month, we take over.…Everything.” He then disappears in a ball of blue light, causing a media frenzy of speculation the likes of which has never been seen. As the lone member of the government’s Unexplained Occurrences Division—whose duties until now have mostly entailed cataloging internet rumors and watching pornography—widower and drug addict Carl Brannigan is placed on the task force assembled to find out just what that cloaked man was talking about. Meanwhile, an enigmatic figure enters the hospital room of a quadriplegic boy named Kevin Splinter and, with a mere touch, cures him of his condition. In San Francisco, 23-year-old freelance video game journalist Miyuki Mitsuraga spends most of her time fielding misogynistic hate mail from male gamers, but she’s just gotten a message from “the ones in the news” asking her for a meeting. After the arrival of cloaked figures at a stadium in San Francisco, where they reveal damaging tapes of the city’s mayor, the strange organization offers Miyuki an interview because her “heart is pure.” The Cloaks, as she names them, claim to be a good government group out to expose corruption and injustice. But it turns out to be a little more complicated than that. With alternate realities, alien civilizations, and city-destroying technology in the mix, this disparate band of outsiders—and a few powerful insiders—must race to figure out what’s coming before it gets here. Casamassina’s (Dead Weight, 2016) prose is voice-driven and inflected with numerous details of his cyberpunk-meets–Comic-Con vision of the future. His attempts at snark often come across more misanthropic than perhaps he means them to—a viral video is described as spreading across the internet “like runaway Gonorrhea at a cheap motel”—but he occasionally reaches moments of lyricism. At one point, Miyuki’s entrance into a club is depicted thusly: “She’s in harmony with these people, all of them dressed like the mutant teenage grandchildren of the industrial and anime gods. Here, she can disappear. The black lights cast them all in periwinkle, their teeth luminescent, their skin paints and contact lenses aglow, until they look alien.” The plot is well-paced and quite riveting, and once the storylines of the various characters begin to intersect and the scope of the conflict reveals itself, readers should become thoroughly invested. The author manages to capture the worldviews, interests, and personalities of gamers in ways both good and bad, but the story has enough broad sci-fi appeal to hook readers who aren’t concerned with that subculture. While the narrative is bloody, profane, jocular, and angst-ridden, an unexpected warmth pervades the work that will likely keep readers with it until the end.
An ambitious and mostly successful sci-fi tale with a bit of social critique.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-79187-080-5
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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