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KINGDOM OF NEEDLE AND BONE

Name: KINGDOM OF NEEDLE AND BONE
Author: Mira Grant
ISBN: 978-1-59606-871-1

by Mira Grant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 31, 2018

A thoughtful nightmare for uncertain times.

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When a devastating virus outbreak strikes, a virologist hatches a radical idea to save the lives of future generations.

While on vacation in Florida, 8-year-old Lisa Morris starts to feel ill but, not wanting to miss the last day of fun, keeps her symptoms to herself. By the time she and her mother, Brooke, and father, Rick, meet her Aunt Isabelle, who happens to be a virologist-turned-pediatrician, at the baggage claim back home, Lisa is in bad shape. Dr. Isabelle Gauley sees what’s on little Lisa’s back, “a deep red, vicious-looking rash, humped up in little peaks, like goosebumps, like acne,” and immediately thinks measles. Quarantine follows, but it’s too late for Lisa, as it is for the people she infected back in Florida and on the plane ride home. Lisa is patient zero, the first identified case of Morris’s disease, which eventually kills about 5 percent of the world’s population, a catastrophic loss of life. The finger-pointing and blame were inevitable, as was the depletion of the vaccination supply, then the outbreaks of whooping cough and mumps. With the world paranoid, exhausted, and divided, Isabelle and her nurses try to mitigate the damage the best they can at their vaccination clinic, but they’re fighting a still-active anti-vaccination movement (of which Brooke and Isabelle’s sister, Angela, a radical activist, is a part). When Brooke approaches Izzy with shocking evidence that Morris’s has indelibly changed its survivors’ immune systems, Izzy puts in motion a controversial plan to save future lives. The pseudonymous Grant (Feedback, 2016, etc.) writes with a lean urgency, taking barbed aim at the anti-vaxxer movement and its surrounding ethics while bolstering her potent cautionary tale with enough scientific factoids to make the whole rolling disaster terrifyingly plausible. Readers will be simultaneously relieved and disappointed when the novella ends, but as Grant makes perfectly clear, this is a fight that is never truly over.

A thoughtful nightmare for uncertain times.

Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-59606-871-1

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Subterranean Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018

Categories:

FANTASY | GENERAL FANTASY | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

- BOOK REVIEW
ALIEN
by Mira Grant

- BOOK REVIEW
INTO THE DROWNING DEEP
by Mira Grant

- BOOK REVIEW
FEEDBACK
by Mira Grant

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SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

by Ray Bradbury ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1962

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A somewhat fragmentary nocturnal shadows Jim Nightshade and his friend Will Halloway, born just before and just after midnight on the 31st of October, as they walk the thin line between real and imaginary worlds. A carnival (evil) comes to town with its calliope, merry-go-round and mirror maze, and in its distortion, the funeral march is played backwards, their teacher's nephew seems to assume the identity of the carnival's Mr. Cooger. The Illustrated Man (an earlier Bradbury title) doubles as Mr. Dark. comes for the boys and Jim almost does; and there are other spectres in this freakshow of the mind, The Witch, The Dwarf, etc., before faith casts out all these fears which the carnival has exploited... The allusions (the October country, the autumn people, etc.) as well as the concerns of previous books will be familiar to Bradbury's readers as once again this conjurer limns a haunted landscape in an allegory of good and evil. Definitely for all admirers.

Pub Date: June 15, 1962

ISBN: 0380977273

Page Count: 312

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
REMEMBRANCE
by Ray Bradbury ; edited by Jonathan R. Eller

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORIES OF RAY BRADBURY
by Ray Bradbury

- BOOK REVIEW
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
by Ray Bradbury

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DUNE

by Frank Herbert ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1965

With its bug-eyed monsters, one might think Dune was written thirty years ago; it has a fantastically complex schemata and...

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This future space fantasy might start an underground craze.

It feeds on the shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Martian series), Aeschylus, Christ and J.R. Tolkien. The novel has a closed system of internal cross-references, and features a glossary, maps and appendices dealing with future religions and ecology. Dune itself is a desert planet where a certain spice liquor is mined in the sands; the spice is a supremely addictive narcotic and control of its distribution means control of the universe. This at a future time when the human race has reached a point of intellectual stagnation. What is needed is a Messiah. That's our hero, called variously Paul, then Muad'Dib (the One Who Points the Way), then Kwisatz Haderach (the space-time Messiah). Paul, who is a member of the House of Atreides (!), suddenly blooms in his middle teens with an ability to read the future and the reader too will be fascinated with the outcome of this projection.

With its bug-eyed monsters, one might think Dune was written thirty years ago; it has a fantastically complex schemata and it should interest advanced sci-fi devotees.