This unapologetically ultraviolent story will surely amass a cult following of those who love female-powered badassery.
A blood-soaked dystopian tale about overpopulation and one woman’s painful but cathartic journey of self-discovery.
Set in near-future New York City, the premise is as simple as it is brutally effective: In an effort to combat rampant overpopulation, the city instituted a “controversial randomized extermination program” called the Kill Train initiative. Professional assassins murder all passengers on a random subway train by the end of the ride. The odds of being on a Kill Train are 1 in 10,000, so most of the populace are willing to take the chance when traveling throughout the city. Enter Vanessa Crow, a struggling single mother with a teenage daughter who is on the precipice of a mental breakdown. When circumstances force her onto a subway train, she knows the odds are in her favor as 580 passengers were just slaughtered on a Kill Train the day before. She fatefully meets an old college friend, Corwin, who reminds Vanessa of the badass woman she used to be. But when the two friends discover that they’re on a Kill Train, Vanessa is forced to battle much more than a group of psychotic killers. Powered by an intriguing, albeit absurd, concept and complemented by visually stunning (and potentially traumatizing) illustrations by Martina Niosi—dismembered and decapitated bodies, intestines hanging like party streamers, etc.—it’s Vanessa’s inner journey through past trauma that makes this graphic novel so memorable. Her problematic relationship with her mother, her unstable financial situation, and her tumultuous but intimate bond with her daughter make her a character that readers can not only understand and identify with but also root for as she fights for her life. Ass-kicking motherly characters like Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Alien’s Ellen Ripley have nothing on Cuartero-Briggs’ Crow.
This unapologetically ultraviolent story will surely amass a cult following of those who love female-powered badassery.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781545817827
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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