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BEFORELIFE

Name: BEFORELIFE
Author: Randal Graham
ISBN: 978-1-77041-317-7

by Randal Graham ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017

A promising premise in need of a good haircut.

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An average Joe finds out there is life after death—though he’s the only one who seems to know it.

Ian Brown is dead. After slipping and falling onto some about-to-be-occupied train tracks, he experiences the curious sensation of being tumbled through water; when he comes to, he is naked on a riverbank with a beautiful woman smiling down at him. This is Tonto Choudhury, and she is his guide through Detroit. Unlike the Detroit readers know, this Detroit is the afterlife: home to immortal souls who have yet to be born. According to Tonto, Ian is a new soul waiting to be embodied, and she insists that his belief that he had a life, a wife, and a messy death in Canada is just a “Beforelife Delusion.” But when Ian is placed in a hospice for others with his condition, his roommate—a British rogue called Rhinnick—and a motley cast of characters including no less than six Napoleons only deepen his conviction that his former life on Earth was very real. This conviction makes him a danger to the equilibrium of Detroit, and those at the highest levels of power—including the crack assassin Socrates—are determined to cure him of his Beforelife Delusion once and for all. Debut novelist and law professor Graham has hit upon a clever and fruitful concept—at 500-plus pages, he has plenty of time to worldbuild, and he is particularly interested in the granular details of the nefarious Detroit government. But too much of the book’s length is Graham reaching for jokes of the jolly-uncle variety (Models are skinny! Canadians are polite!), and one can’t help but feel that a taut, madcap thriller lurks underneath the shaggy exterior.

A promising premise in need of a good haircut.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-77041-317-7

Page Count: 536

Publisher: ECW Press

Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017

Categories:

FANTASY | SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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New York Times Bestseller

DEVOLUTION

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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Awards & Accolades

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Our Verdict

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New York Times Bestseller

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.