This semi-surreal, visionary, apocalyptic SF pilgrimage engages readers while keeping its secrets.
Two Michigan men revive from comas decades after a mysterious astronomical event altered the laws of nature and try to navigate the bizarre phenomena of a transformed, largely deserted North America.
In this sequel to Heasley’s debut SF novel, Under a Darkening Moon (2022), a bizarre cosmic disaster, the “moondark,” has overtaken the world. The time frame here is 27 years after some kind of celestial collision (or was it?) of an object with Earth’s moon spewed out a blanket of ejecta covering the planet. But it was no mere fall of moondust; the fundamental laws of nature and the universe were shaken. Now, near Detroit, two men, biologist Mort Sowinski and would-be hairstylist Todd Farkas, awaken from decades-long comas, covered in yolklike sacs (their own skins, actually) and not visibly aged. They explore a deserted landscape of ruins and strangeness, where long-extinct fauna, creatures of myth and legend, apparitions, and threatening yet oddly ineffectual, marauding humanoid robots may be encountered. A note left by Todd’s long-evacuated family directs the pair toward Rocky Mountain territory, and—via an advanced Navy anti-gravity vehicle—the duo heads west. Enigmas continue to pile up, with the men speculating that even their own inner psyches, subconscious dissatisfactions, and obsessions are somehow manifesting things in the material universe, perhaps dangerously so. Even when they encounter the organized remnants of humankind (a global population now reduced to a billion) in Colorado—the new seat of government—the protagonists still sense that elusive facts about the moondark are being deliberately withheld from them by the authorities. Perhaps with good reason.
Acquaintance with the first book is not absolutely necessary to enjoy this one, a rare quality in multivolume mind-benders. The sequel is reminiscent of such SF tales of altered cosmology and reality-turned-upside-down as Fred Hoyle’s October the First Is Too Late (1966) and Stephen King’s novella The Mist (1980) or, if readers really dare to go there, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The increasingly philosophical narrative teases readers with questions and hallucinatory developments, even at the risk of making them doubtful that there will be any solid answers to the plot’s conundrums. The author is a Roman Catholic priest, and while very little here may be called evangelical in the usual SF genre sense, religion receives praise as having perhaps a better grip on these things than science ever will. (But the dollops of science that Heasley drops in here and there, courtesy of doctorate-holding Mort, are impressive as well.) There are respectful portrayals of Crow tribal mysticism blended with a guest appearance by an African-born pope, a priest who is a computer programmer, an unspoken approximation of the Gaia hypothesis (that Earth has an overarching soul spirit and self-awareness), and even a mention of the “rapture,” albeit this one seems far from the right-wing Christian prophecies and polemics that typify the Left Behind franchise and its disciples. The engrossing tale ends with a fantastic Jules Verne–esque journey that leaves many riddles remaining to be answered. As Todd says at one point, “Definitely Dreamland.”
This semi-surreal, visionary, apocalyptic SF pilgrimage engages readers while keeping its secrets. (science fiction)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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