THE SKULL CAGE KEY

Name: THE SKULL CAGE KEY
Author: Michel Marriott
ISBN: 978-1-932841-30-5

by Michel Marriott ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2008

Placed against the dreary world of the future, this cheerless novel succeeds if only for its informed and fascinating look...

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Marriott (Journalism/Baruch Coll.), a former technology reporter for the New York Times, provides a dark and disturbing, yet simultaneously intriguing, look at a future where technology has moved forward but human relationships trail behind.

In the postwar United States of 2041, residents are divided into two classes—“Dark” and “Light”—based on the color of their skin. Armstrong Black, a handsome Harlem-born Dark, unwittingly tumbles into a conspiracy involving Harlem's dirty underbelly of gangs, drug dealers and sex-for-hire. Shacked up in a ritzy hotel with his boss, Army locks gazes with an intriguing woman through a window right before things go terribly wrong: A gang of thugs breaks into the hotel suite and decapitates Army's boss and lover, leaving him as the prime suspect in her murder. Army is taken into custody and questioned, but eventually escapes into a city plagued by the need for a new and ultra-deadly drug called Hedz. The drug, which allows users to experience a stranger's best memories, can only be harvested by slaughtering others, but local law enforcement is already on the case. Also on the killers' trail is life-weary former detective Reagan, kicked off the force years ago. Pressed into action by his former partner, Reagan soon finds his path converging with Army, the mysterious woman seen by Army and a host of sinister drug dealers with equally sinister plans. Featuring sex that manages to be dark but strangely lacking in eroticism, as well as blood by the gallon, the story offers a cast of weird characters, some of whom speak in almost incomprehensible and distracting street parlance. Ultimately, the three main characters (one of whom has an unexplained and odd name change mid-novel) come together in a bloody and futuristic showdown in the heart of Harlem.

Placed against the dreary world of the future, this cheerless novel succeeds if only for its informed and fascinating look at the future of technology.

Pub Date: May 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-932841-30-5

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Agate

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008

Categories:

SCIENCE FICTION

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MORNING STAR

From the Red Rising Trilogy series , Vol. 3

by Pierce Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2016

An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.

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Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.

This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”

An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015

Categories:

SCIENCE FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION

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IRON GOLD
by Pierce Brown

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by Pierce Brown

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RED RISING
by Pierce Brown

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GOLDEN SON

From the Red Rising Trilogy series , Vol. 2

by Pierce Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2015

Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...

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Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.

The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.

Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.