Quietly insightful speculative fiction that will appeal to fans of Westworld and Black Mirror.
A high-tech, remote summer camp provides the setting for two women’s explorations of their humanity in Grim’s debut SF novel.
The mysterious, mountainous Camp Phoenix is open for the season with a high-priced, exclusive program that offers the chance for the superrich to experience a summer as children again. Proprietary technology transfers each adult’s consciousness into an ultimately disposable clone of themself as a child with no memory of their future life; each camper chooses their age prior to arrival. Among this year’s campers is middle-aged Logan Adler, who attends with her husband, Max Gill, as 12-year-olds in an attempt to rekindle their relationship. On the other side of camp, 20-year-old Sam is returning for a second stint as a counselor, leaving her life in Paris behind along with her misgivings about her previous Camp Phoenix experience. As Logan navigates puberty and new friendships, she develops a crush on the wrong boy—someone who stands accused of a crime as an adult, outside camp. Meanwhile, Sam experiences her own ups and downs as a counselor but receives more responsibility from higher-ups. As she gains more knowledge about the ins and outs of what they do there, she starts to question not only the morality of her work, but also the boundary between reality and illusion. Grim’s novel is mostly a quiet, slow-moving reflection on second chances, the ethics of cloning, the privileges of the rich, and what it means to be human. The story’s perspective alternates between that of Sam and Logan, exploring the experiences of the campers and the counselors, by turns. There’s a tinge of unreliability to their narration that gives the tale a compelling, evocative, and uneasy feel. The author also cleverly weaves in the ever changing story of a ghost who supposedly haunts the camp—the eponymous Danny McGee—adding an extra layer to the story in which everybody’s repeatedly told to “Stay on the trails.”
Quietly insightful speculative fiction that will appeal to fans of Westworld and Black Mirror.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 278
Publisher: California Coldblood Books
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.
In which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday.
“Memory is a labyrinth.” Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Miéville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter’s “weird fiction” subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He’s not nice: “That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone,” warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer—early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, “I kill and kill and kill again,” adding that he’d really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he’s not so much immortal as “infinitely mortal.” B, as one might imagine, isn’t the life of the party—and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly (“A gush of cream- and rust-colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water”). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It’s not always easy to follow, but it’s clear that Reeves and Miéville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language (“the huff-huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be”).
A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593446591
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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