While not exactly innovative, a highly entertaining, speculative glimpse of the end of the world.
A debut novel offers a fusion of apocalyptic fiction, SF, and horror that chronicles a family’s struggle to survive after civilization collapses.
In near-future Southern California, 20-year-old Grace Baker’s life is turned upside down when terrorists destroy the national power grid, effectively throwing the country into chaos. Her father, a former military man who used to have top-secret clearance, succeeds in getting his family (which includes Grace, her mother, and her older brother) out of Los Angeles before the city is bombed to rubble by an unknown adversary. Dodging roving bands of criminals and collecting valuable goods along the way, the Bakers make it north to a secluded cabin they own hidden in a remote forest. But their chances of survival are greatly reduced when they realize that the post-apocalyptic world is now inhabited by invisible monsters that are hunting humans like prey. One by one, Grace’s family members are killed until she is left alone to fend for herself. While on a scavenging mission in a nearby town, she fatefully meets Nick Gates, a young cafe worker (and potential love interest) she knew from “Before.” Together they decide that they need to figure out a way to kill the monsters, even if it means dying in the process. While the story’s apocalyptic setting brings nothing new to the table and the invisible-monster thread has more than a few plot holes, Shannon delivers the goods by creating characters that are identifiable and emotionally compelling. Grace, for example, is a book nerd and analytical problem solver who turns out to be an ultimate badass at world’s end. Her bond with Nick is tumultuous and complicated but also undeniably authentic—and the evolution of that relationship throughout the horrors they face is an unarguable strength of this utterly readable tale.
While not exactly innovative, a highly entertaining, speculative glimpse of the end of the world.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63867-004-9
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
DYSTOPIAN FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT DYSTOPIAN FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT MYSTERY & THRILLER | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION | APOCALYPTIC & POST APOCALYPTIC SCI-FI | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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