Spec Fic at its best: accessible and inventive, while remaining thoroughly extraordinary.
An engaging collection of 100-word stories accompanied by petroglyphic images.
Bantock tells us in his introduction that the box containing these 100 stories, each 100 words long, and a group of petroglyphic images was “reportedly found in an attic, in North London” and sent to him by the bemused homeowner. The stories have no known author or key to their enigmatic content and images, so Bantock decides to publish them, hoping a reader can solve the puzzle posed in a note found in the box with the manuscript. It seems the idea is to find one word from each tale that will then create a final, 100-word story that belongs to the reader themselves. The whimsical, often humorous, tales are a mixture of SF, fantasy, mild horror, historical, mythological, and/or paranormal fiction, as well as simple vignettes of relatable lives. A woman trying on lingerie receives a tattoo from a passing jellyfish. A man places stars in space using his cabinet of curiosities. Angels are captured and bottled to make quality perfume. A group of 1903 settlers find a crashed starship. God’s Uncle Albert once thought about creating sentient life, but eventually decided it was a bad idea. There are beach-going ghosts, an orangutan pilot from WWII, surrealists playing chess, and a girl who starts chewing her nails and can’t stop until she’s eaten herself. A woman cleverly thwarts a misogynistic tailgater trying to intimidate her. An accountant escapes the Great War via embezzlement. A court jester sacrifices himself for his beloved queen. A small clown appears in a fish tank. The Sandman, Leda and the Swan, and the infamous cat Pangur Ban make appearances. With each turn of the page, one never quite knows what to expect. The mischievous illustrations, saturated with color, only hint at something recognizable, usually a bit of an animal or plant. Even if the puzzle remains unsolved, readers will find themselves delighted, intrigued, and often moved by the love, pain, and wonder of these finely written drabbles.
Spec Fic at its best: accessible and inventive, while remaining thoroughly extraordinary.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781616964078
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Tachyon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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