Cautious brush strokes help sell this speculative story of art as the basis of a future police state.
In a post-apocalyptic future ruled by a dictator who uses art to control the surviving populace, an independent painter makes a bid to help a brewing rebellion.
Tremblay’s dystopian SF novel takes place in a ruined future Earth ravaged by six world wars. The ultimate victor was a warlord called Skylah, “Ruler of the Eyes and the Hands,” who dropped an apocalyptic defoliation bomb (“All photosynthetic vegetabilia was instantly petrified”). Now, all that’s left of civilization is a high-tech, affluent, still-green domed city called Mahl and the outlying “Dumps,” slums in which foragers are preyed upon. The final war abolished religion and instituted the “New Art Government” (NAG); temples were turned into galleries, and art now reigns as the supreme social structure and means of control. “Trigger” artists produce oversize psychotropic canvases that play to the viewers’ most lurid and mind-altering sensations. Beholders are either turned into manageable packs of art-addicted “junkheads” or violent “Hounds” who fanatically support and promote their favorite artists. Isobel is one of the only non-government-affiliated painters in the Dumps, doing landscapes purely for the joy of it. This habit marks her as subversive and a target for the Hounds. After her studio is raided, Isobel shelters with rebels who intend to smuggle her into Mahl City in the guise of a Trigger to create a pipeline for weapons and espionage. Things don’t go exactly as planned. The author, who’s also an artist and musician, asks a lot in the suspension-of-disbelief department, and it might be tempting to see this SF yarn as a cathartic satire of the whole pretentious gallery scene (What if art trendoids literally ruled the world?). But the characterizations are not campy, and pain, passions, and violence are conveyed as agonizingly and earnestly here as they were in the Hunger Games and Handmaid’s Tale cycles. In a wise gambit, the sensation-producing paintings are never described in detail—only their devastating emotional effects are depicted, and Tremblay doesn’t overextend her metaphor to include juicy targets such as the pathologies of big-money art dealing and collecting.
Cautious brush strokes help sell this speculative story of art as the basis of a future police state. (science fiction)Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
