Nuclear holocaust, savagery, and space aliens converge on Cleveland in a competent start to a five-part series.
After a nuclear strike ravages the world, suburbanites in northeast Ohio struggle in a harsh new environment of subsistence-survival and murderous gangs—unaware that an alien spaceship is en route.
Author Wood (Trash, 2018, etc.) begins his sci-fi pentalogy with a narrative that is unequally split between pulpy post-apocalyptic action-survival and alien first-contact. In the near future, Islamist fanatics in Tadzhikistan launch an all-out nuclear strike using high-yield weapons and electromagnetic pulse bombs bought from Russia and China (the terrorists have no compunction about firing the warheads right back at Russia and China). All global communications cease, and most major world cities are atomized, though the worst of the thermonuclear holocaust spares much of the American Midwest. Still, with food shipments, goods, and government authority all but extinct, civilization quickly degrades into gang looting and barbarism. Just to the west of Cleveland, Taylor MacPherson is a mild-mannered engineer, reluctantly thrust into a role of local protector and leader of his community when area biker gangs and lowlifes start raping and pillaging. Successfully beating back marauders with improvised weapons and barricades, Taylor and his fellow suburbanites begin the task of restarting organized society, with currency, taxes, and courts. Meanwhile, however, in deep space, a bizarre, egg-laying hermaphroditic species called the Qu’uda have just detected their first transmissions from Earth (which they call Kota). The possibility of a habitable planet—strategically important now that the Qu’uda are in a state of hostilities with another space-going race—sparks a long-distance expedition to the Kota system. Wood tells his prepper yarn in effective, get-the-job-done prose reminiscent of Alistair MacLean. Sympathy is generated for the hero and his cohorts, and Taylor is a regular-fellow type surprised by how quickly he accommodates violence and survivalist pragmatism when he must. As thinly shaded as the ET stuff is in this kickoff, the question of whether the Qu’uda will turn out friend or foe here makes for a tantalizing one in the view of the saga. Northeast Ohio readers and armchair Cleveland tourists (if any) will be interested in the ways Wood works the geography of that much-besmirched city into the plotline.
Nuclear holocaust, savagery, and space aliens converge on Cleveland in a competent start to a five-part series.Pub Date: June 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-387-33591-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Faucett Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
