Tantalizing prose carries what is essentially a cautionary tale about unintended consequences; Calder is worth watching.
The narrator of British author Calder’s eerie dystopian novel is a young woman living on an isolated island within sight of a mainland ravaged by infection.
The novel’s greatest draw is the woman’s enthralling voice, archaically formal and casually poetic. Whether her story makes sense or should be trusted is another matter. She avoids explaining why she’s ended up on the island, secure in a well-stocked bunker under a disintegrating ancient castle. Her sole companion is handsome, mysterious Crevan, who joined her some time ago and calls her Kit though it’s not her name. Although she sometimes, creepily, calls him daddy, he is clearly not her father. Nor are they lovers, although the sexual tension can grow intense. She prefers not to dwell on risk and considers Crevan paranoid. He repeatedly promises he will never hurt and always protect her, but she doesn’t trust stories about his previous life and how he was forced to kill in self-defense. Still, she’s fascinated by his explanations of the strange tattooed patches pricked onto his arm while he was a captive of what they both call backbiters, former doctors now “a-hunting” human blood. Why they’re doing so remains initially unclear, although Kit occasionally breaks away from personal obsessing to deliver treatises on how humankind has reached “the end of days” because science has lost the battle against devouring bacteria that attack not only people, but, more disastrously, plastic. Meanwhile, Kit’s happy on the island and drawing closer to Crevan. Then a half-dead woman shows up to disrupt, possibly infect Kit and Crevan’s uneasy paradise, and Kit discovers she’s willing to do almost anything to survive. Although Calder missteps with an unfortunate last plot twist into psychological melodrama, the bulk of her novel plays cleverly with contagion and bacteria as metaphors for the spread of both good and evil.
Tantalizing prose carries what is essentially a cautionary tale about unintended consequences; Calder is worth watching.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781419764660
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
This fresh reworking of a Greek myth will resonate.
An otherworldly Latinx retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in the South Bronx.
Pheus visits his father in the Bronx every summer. The Afro-Dominican teen is known for his mesmerizing bachata music, love of history, and smooth way with the ladies. Eury, a young Puerto Rican woman and Hurricane Maria survivor, is staying with her cousin for the summer because of a recent, unspecified traumatic event. Her family doesn’t know that she’s been plagued since childhood by the demonlike Ato. Pheus and Eury bond over music and quickly fall in love. Attacked at a dance club by Sileno, its salacious and satyrlike owner, Eury falls into a coma and is taken to el Inframundo by Ato. Pheus, despite his atheism, follows the advice of his father and a local bruja to journey to find his love in the Underworld. Rivera skillfully captures the sounds and feels of the Bronx—its unique, diverse culture and the creeping gentrification of its neighborhoods. Through an amalgamation of Greek, Roman, and Taíno mythology and religious beliefs, gaslighting, the colonization of Puerto Rico, Afro-Latinidad identity, and female empowerment are woven into the narrative. While the pacing lags in the middle, secondary characters aren’t fully developed, and the couple’s relationship borders on instalove, the rush of a summertime romance feels realistic. Rivera’s complex world is well realized, and the dialogue rings true. All protagonists are Latinx.
This fresh reworking of a Greek myth will resonate. (Fabulism. 14-adult)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5476-0373-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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