A measured and inquisitive speculative mystery with a lyrical soul.
In Johnson’s debut SF novel, an experienced investigator looks into several murders in an era in which serious crime is almost nonexistent.
Decades in the future, Ansel Black is the last detective left on the Rim, a sparsely populated windswept region between the urbanized Everything Sector and the uninhabitable Waste. When it comes to solving crimes, he’s not entirely on his own, though: He has an ANI (short for annotated intelligence) program that can predict the likelihood of any suspect’s guilt as a percentage. There aren’t that many Real Crimes anymore, as most people stay at home inside their cubes and act out their destructive urges in an ANI-run virtual reality known as the Stream. The ruminative Ansel is unsatisfied with both his work and his life in general: “Years as a detective have developed in Ansel something of a sixth sense: specifically, an ability to measure the proximity of a truth that is just out of grasp. It is a sense that has guided him…to surprising confessions. He has but to apply it to something greater.” Then he catches five strange murders. The victims were found shot to death in a religious settlement at the edge of the Waste. ANI’s comprehensive observation network somehow missed how all five of them got there, but evidence suggests each of them arrived on their own. Clearly, someone (or several someones) blacked out ANI’s cameras—a feat that Ansel would normally have considered to be an impossibility. To figure out how these people died, he will have to rely on an antiquated solution: good old-fashioned detective work. The ensuing investigation, which involves clues hidden in cryptic paintings of children watched over by a backward moon, soon becomes a personal quest into the true purpose of ANI—and of Ansel himself.
In its themes and content, this novel is reminiscent of the works of Philip K. Dick. In the world of the novel, technology has reached the singularity—the Great Merger, as it’s called—rendering humankind largely obsolete. The slightly old-fashioned Ansel, who fetishizes the pre-Merger “Classic Era” and writes his musings by hand in a diary, makes for a thoughtful foil to the dystopian world in which he lives. Over the course of the novel, Johnson’s tidy prose effectively captures the melancholic weirdness of the desertlike Rim, a place of ruins and abandoned objects: “Ansel leans into the dead Rim atmosphere as the breeze pulls softly towards the Waste. His longjacket ruffles sideways past the splintered framework of some structure that has lost its identity. He scans the rubble with his wrist enhancement and ANI provides her empty synopsis of the area’s history.” As in Dick’s work, the story eschews a tight mystery structure and doesn’t generate a great deal of narrative momentum. Ansel’s philosophical journal entries are frequently excerpted, and his personal struggle for meaning and purpose provides the book’s true narrative arc. Fans of cerebral SF will likely devour this offering and eagerly await Johnson’s future books.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1087999920
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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