A haunting dystopian thriller that’s underpinned by a compelling political mystery.
In Colapietro’s novel, a woman who’s been imprisoned since she was abducted as a young girl learns about the destructive political and technological forces that have laid waste to America.
When the shadowy Chaplain Davis visits abductee Mencken Barnes in the Kestral, where she and many others are jailed, he asks a question: “What is your desire in life?” Mencken, in dirty scrubs and with only powder for food, is resolute: “Freedom.” Vague memories of her parents, Olivia and Ashwyn Barnes, drive her grim instinct for survival, as does a mantra she learned from her mother: “Scientia potentia est,” or “Knowledge is power.” She finds a mysterious text, titled Where Gods Whisper, which details political tortures and disappearances. In this book, author Frederick R. Ewing collates the “Chambers documents,” which trace Henry Chambers’ role as a “Tolson Homebot specialist at a Devol Technologies workshop in Youngstown.” Among other things, she reads that Tolson Homebots are present in more than 70% of American homes while perusing a series of newspaper clippings and transcripts of conversations between U.S. President Marcel Douglas and Devol Technologies founder and CEO James McHenry from February 2051. The robots, which are powered by artificial intelligence and “free of sin or waste,” are constructed by workers in poor conditions. A whistle-blowing dissident organization, Libertas, strives to stop production and publicize the dangers of these devices. When Mencken finally escapes to search for her parents, a desolate landscape awaits her, where she sees pamphlets describing “where to go in the event of a nuclear strike” and wonders, “Was she the last person alive?” To survive, she must untangle all that she has read and find the disturbing truth.
Colapietro cleverly aligns the reader with Mencken; both must piece together what’s happened to the nation by using the titular text-within-a-text. The story is well plotted, balancing the protagonist’s escape from the Kestral with the intriguing information found in the Chambers documents. The account of the knotty alliance between a tech company and the government acts as a dark, modern parable on the real-life consequences and ethics of AI usage. Mencken meets the sympathetic Oslo Arguello, who teaches her how to survive; he also offers much-needed hope and possibility amid the gloom, with a “booming laugh that whittled into a wheeze.” Her aphorism, “scientia potential est,” is tested when she eventually reunites with her father. Mencken’s initial resistance to him is, perhaps, too readily suppressed by her deep desire to be part of a family. However, her characterization deepens as she remembers her desire for freedom, which she eventually feels is “being taken from her again.” In the book’s second half, the narrative briskly details U.S. Sen. Arthur Timms’ role in history and his rise to power, driven by a desire to break “the systems that broke his mother”; the two halves feel slightly disjointed, although the Barnes family’s involvement in the overarching drama binds the narrative together. Ridley’s eerie and colorful pen-and-ink drawings lend increasingly dark visual layers to the plot.
A haunting dystopian thriller that’s underpinned by a compelling political mystery.Pub Date: July 8, 2026
ISBN: 9798995064503
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Paradigm
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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