An augmented soldier fights against apocalyptic nightmares in a brutal war to save humanity.
Debut novelist Ashcroft unleashes a witch’s brew of macabre, Lovecraft-ian imagery in this strange horror novel that couches a heavy emotional arc within its video game–like setting. Our narrator is former LAPD officer–turned–cybernetic survivor Theo Adams circa 2051, in the last days of the human race. Seven years earlier a “Hollow War” decimated Earth’s population with rail guns and viruses before unleashing the terrifying creatures of the Harvest, known to survivors as the Scourge: “The fiends, bruisers, tender-monkeys, huddlers, snatch rats, cabritas. Rape, slaughter, feast. You don’t need to be reminded in detail. You got organized. You got weapons and established perimeters.” Now some 50,000 scarred survivors remain in the Santa Monica Collective, a ragtag, militarized band of soldiers barely winning skirmishes with the monsters they face. On one side of this conflict there is the Megarothke, the unstoppable, spiderlike killing machine who leads the Scourge, aided by a human quisling called The Recluse. On the other, the Orbital, a desperate but well-armed group of survivors who have fled to orbit but yearn to return to Earth. In flashbacks, Theo takes us back 10 years to his troubled, soon-to-end marriage, whose only saving grace is his daughter, Amelie. The situation is made worse when his ex becomes entangled with a cult called the Trans-Sentience movement, where a splinter faction wants to use a kind of sorcery to summon a powerful demon called the Lightbringer. It’s some heavy mythology-building but Ashcroft’s skillful blend of noir vocabulary and cyberpunk aesthetics work to its advantage. Between its robotic doppelgängers, mutated monsters, and actual ray guns, the book manages to take a hard look at what it means to be human in an age when humanity barely remains.
A bloody, blistering novel of war and sacrifice set in a time of actual monsters.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946487-06-3
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Cinestate
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
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Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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