A gripping tale that features chilling monsters, an eerie mystery, and intriguing characters.
While searching for her lost boyfriend on Mount Denali, a woman finds something more sinister than she ever imagined in this graphic novel.
Hooky Hidalgo is climbing Mount Denali and livestreaming the experience when he loses his handhold and falls onto a ledge. After assuring the streaming audience that he’s fine, he mentions seeing a cave entrance with weird carvings (“They look majorly ancient”) and then the feed goes dead. Only 33 hours later, Hooky’s girlfriend, Becca Burgos, has made it to Mount Denali to find out what happened to him. With no vacancies available in town, the local cops are surprisingly helpful, finding Becca a place to stay in a rental cabin. But it’s a setup—Becca is meant to be a sacrifice to a large, haunting creature and the locals are hoping her death will keep more people from trying to follow Hooky up the mountain. Escaping the monster, with the help of a local, Shailene Simmons, Becca runs farther up the mountain with her new friend. Shailene has been studying the weird creatures in the area and the Dark Pyramid—a structure inside the mountain—that the government has been keeping quiet for years. Since Becca and Shailene survived the first attack, the military is pulling out all the stops to try to prevent them from uncovering the truth about the Dark Pyramid and what happened to Hooky. And if killing the pair is the easiest way to do that, so be it. While they are battling the military and monsters alike, can Becca and Shailene survive what the Dark Pyramid is throwing at them? In this tense and violent graphic novel, Tobin and Holden have created a captivating world of gods, monsters, and strange, human-faced goats. With a mostly dark color scheme, the striking art fits the vibe of the engrossing tale. Cryptids abound, and the mystery of the Dark Pyramid will appeal to readers who prefer a little mythology and archaeology with their SF. This spooky story, which stars two distinctive female heroes facing terrifying creatures, will also delight horror and cryptozoology fans. While the action-packed tale offers a satisfying conclusion, the final pages set the stage for a sequel.
A gripping tale that features chilling monsters, an eerie mystery, and intriguing characters.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781545820452
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A hybrid novel that messily blends the uncanny and the otherworldly.
A girl on an interstellar intelligence mission faces a series of peculiar and grotesque dangers.
Sisilla, the narrator of Kraus’ first foray into SF, is a Niffakoq, one in a line of golden children selected for special missions, their brains enhanced with six “niks,” small implants that bestow deeper reserves of intelligence and empathy. These are effectively suicide missions—Niffakoqs traditionally die before their teens. But of course Sisilla isn’t traditional, starting with her deliberate (and gory) removal of one nik from her eye socket to quell a headache. Whether she’s strengthened or weakened by one fewer nik is the open question this brash, if overlong, novel strives to answer. Sisilla is tasked with heading to the planet Fém on behalf of a “trigov” to learn why it’s gone incommunicado. Assisting her is a literal motley crew that hews to space-opera type: A security guard named Murder 005, a buxom engineer named Jayne Mae Marilyn Bardot, and a captain who may be Sisilla’s father. But Kraus, who’s cut his teeth on horror novels, lets the ickiness abound: Their ship, The Sickness, is made of a squishily organic material, deaths tend to arrive in spectacularly bloody fashion, and the internet is so troll-infested that even a moment’s search means exposure to violent, traumatizing imagery. Kraus seems to have borrowed heavily from both Ender’s Game and the Alien franchise for worldbuilding purposes, though he adds a few of his own peculiarities—his vision of Fém, a “metal planet” where the waters resemble oceans of chains, is inspired. Still, much of the (convoluted) story alternates between the gross-out and the whiz-bang, obscuring the deeper themes of parentage, womanhood, and mythology that Kraus explores. Le Guin covered similar territory more smoothly, with less need for stomach-churning digressions.
A hybrid novel that messily blends the uncanny and the otherworldly.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668079478
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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