An offbeat, hit-and-miss fantasy that’s often sharp and energetic but sometimes wonky and anodyne.
Troubled souls seek redemption in a computerized afterlife in this SF fantasia.
Mars’ tale centers on three San Franciscans at the ends of their tethers: Alice Bailey Crowley, a 60-year-old cabdriver with failing eyesight who lives in a camp for unhoused people; Khozzmkk Emcee, a Punjabi Mexican American Lyft driver and aspiring rapper; and RL Sims, a squirrely cabdriver and Vietnam veteran who passionately hates ride-hailing services. Bailey hangs herself after she’s told that her granddaughter has drowned, and Khozzmkk and RL both perish in a road-rage incident that ends in gunfire; the trio’s etheric bodies go to Circus Mind, a magical role-playing video game produced by Over Soul, Inc. It’s essentially the afterlife, drawing on elements of Hindu and Buddhist belief. There, the three endure hellish illusions, get counsel from a spirit guide called the Duke of Joe, and learn that they’re but three different facets of a single higher-dimensional being. Khozzmkk and RL get reincarnated—by a gizmo called the Great Karmonic Accelerator—in late-19th-century New York, and the narrative follows Khozzmkk’s adventures as a Black cabdriver who frequently faces racist affronts but raps exuberantly to his passengers, who include modernist poet Ezra Pound. The stakes of their new lives are high: Unless RL and Khozzmkk work off the bad karma from previous existences, they and Bailey, who’s still in Circus Mind, could be reincarnated as bacteria. Mars’ yarn unusually combines hip-hop–flavored realism with colorful fantasy and Eastern spiritual themes of empathy and self-restraint. He’s a talented writer whose prose is punchy and evocative: “He got on top of Pepe and unleashed some vicious ground-and-pound punishment. Blood spurted out of the poet’s mouth. Pepe probably lost more teeth.” The fantasy sections, in particular, are wildly inventive, with the sardonic, surreal quality of a William S. Burroughs hallucination. Unfortunately, the drama and pathos of the heroes’ earthly struggles dissipate in the scenes set in Circus Mind, a tutelary bureaucracy where death just means another go-round after some dreary New Age–style seminars.
An offbeat, hit-and-miss fantasy that’s often sharp and energetic but sometimes wonky and anodyne.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2022
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
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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