A fast-paced, bantamweight space adventure heavily inspired by semi-occult lore.
In Meroving’s SF novel, when the rebel archangel Lucifer declares independence from the worlds allied with Paradise, a young mortal girl joins the ensuing fray.
In this faith-based novel, the author takes inspiration from The Urantia Book, which collects alleged messages from celestial beings delivered to a handful of people in Chicago across the first half of the 20th century. The apparent project of The Urantia Book is to retell Judeo-Christian religious narratives with the input of the spirit-beings while incorporating (as best the anonymous authors could) actual science, referencing distant planets and astrophysics—though it stops short of trendy 1970s paperback-peddling notions positing that God and angels are advanced aliens. This slim volume relates the ancient rebellion against heaven by the exalted archangel Lucifer (his full title: “the Lanonandek Son, the Sovereign of Satania, Lucifer Abaddon de Raphael”). Prideful arrogance drives him to make a declaration of independence against the Father (God) and sever relations with worlds allied to Paradise to form his own “Dominion,” with a powerful militia of “Guardians.” Lucifer’s arguments (and the threat of the Guardians) are enough to make 37 other planets join the rebellion, and thus divine civil war erupts, fought with spaceships and other advanced weaponry. Panoptia, a “Protocol 2: Level 5 inhabited world,” is a contested territory where young Ellanora Rose, a mortal girl, assumes the role of resistance fighter when Luciferians seize Panoptia’s resident “Custodian” as a hostage. With occasional narrative leaps ahead in years, many details of the struggle are elided, and the epic concludes in fewer than 100 pages. The positivity level is high, the character development is fitful at best, and the gadgets and gimmicks recall pulp SF of an earlier era. Other authors have mined ostensibly holy writ for their fiction (see Ben-Hur)—The Urantia Book is fair game, but this is flighty stuff at best.
A fast-paced, bantamweight space adventure heavily inspired by semi-occult lore.Pub Date: May 10, 2023
ISBN: 9798394260681
Page Count: 93
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2024
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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