A well-paced action thriller with a wide-eyed premise that works hard to shake readers awake.
In this cinematic thriller, crippling insomnia infects the tourists and residents of a small town following the appearance of a mysteriously silent orphan.
Like most out-of-balance tourist towns that bustle a few months out of the year, Carratuck Island is heavy with “the uneasy tolerance between sulky islanders trapped in service jobs and finicky, demanding tourists who have planned and saved for a few days of having their way, right now and just so.” It’s also a place of rampant mobile-device addiction. Blank-faced tourists bathe in the glow of iPads rather than sunsets. Tensions in town come to a boil when locals and tourists begin losing sleep and take desperate measures to turn themselves off with some sleep. Freirich (Winged Creatures, 2008) favors a wide shot, and this cinematic follow-up to his successful debut novel (which was turned into the 2008 film Fragments) unfolds in multiple perspectives. Sam Carlson, once a hotshot Boston psychiatrist and now haunted by a patient’s suicide, has worked as a physician on the island for a year, his job consisting mostly of treating “the heaves from a bad steamer clam, or alcohol poisoning.” When an expressionless child appears, addicted to a handheld video game and marred by some unknown grief, Sam attempts to find the boy’s parents in addition to battling his own guilt; he’s in an increasingly hallucinatory state of mind. Meanwhile, Cort, a Twitter-addicted adolescent, has ditched her clueless mother to smoke pot with a surfer boyfriend. The most fascinating character of the bunch, she plays a curious sort of game in which the participants must tweet every 15 minutes for 43 straight hours. It’s a solid if somewhat heavy-handed metaphor: “The billions of synapses of our brains finally become like the binary bits of all we listened to or looked at, on/off, awake or dead, no in between.” The writing can be somewhat preachy, though the shifting point of view and long passages of action—such as a sequence in which the police chief wanders the beach in the rain—seem easily translatable to the screen.
A well-paced action thriller with a wide-eyed premise that works hard to shake readers awake.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Meerkat Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2019
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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