A fetchingly oddball fantasy with plenty to keep readers awake.
Thanks to mail-order pills, a jaded barista discovers she has the power to change reality via lucid dreaming in Tremblay’s novel.
Edie Stacks is a habitual loner, bitter at turning 30 with little money, a subsistence job as a coffee server, and only her plants and an oddball record collection for her solace. Then an apartment fire drives her out to seek new lodgings in an apartment building full of noisy neighbors. Sleep interruption compels Edie to answer a magazine’s mail-order ad for an “all-natural sleeping pill, made from the exotic plant Tewtew, grown on the pacific island of Luumore.” But there are side effects: She experiences particularly lucid dreams, and the results manifest in her waking life; for example, she dreams of a plant that materializes as a gift to Wolf, a nice guy at the record shop whom she keeps at arm’s length. Determined to turn the phenomenon to her advantage, Edie purposefully dreams into existence a $5 million insurance windfall for her fire losses and then a posh mansion. But in another dream, she violently fights against a sexual assault, and as the line between nocturnal visions and reality becomes blurred, she finds that time itself can’t be trusted. Edie takes Wolf into her confidence, and they share lucid dreams, but there’s a larger game afoot involving otherworldly beings, mass death, and lots of cats. Tremblay, the author of Topaz (2017), ultimately goes an absurdist-comedic route in this work, à la Tom Robbins with a soupçon of Thorne Smith, after presenting readers with opening passages that invoke a Borges-ian sense of unease over the protagonist’s surreal plight. This off-putting vibe is most likely due to a stated gambit by the author, also an artist/musician, to incorporate her actual dreams into the narrative, and they are effectively memorable and sometimes disturbing—and she earns bonus points for using the word oneironaut (a rarely used term for lucid dreamer). Tremblay almost simultaneously released Crash Kitty, a prelude novella; a sample opening chapter is helpfully included here as well.
A fetchingly oddball fantasy with plenty to keep readers awake.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9690172-7-1
Page Count: 346
Publisher: GrindSpark Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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