A thoughtful tale of fame and its power.
A reclusive rock star is drawn out when a stranger enters his life in this comic collection from writer Hoffman and artist Žeželj.
In a technologically advanced and dystopian near future, Craig (better known by his stage name, Nostalgia) was once a revolutionary musician, but after not making any new music for years, he’s become completely detached from both his creative life and his former insurrectionist ties: “I can’t get arrested these days,” he says to someone currently fighting against the system. “And I’m not looking to.” When Nathan appears, claiming to be his son, Craig is skeptical but open to forming a bond with the younger man. The story flashes back to Craig’s earlier life—his parents, his rise to fame, and subsequent withdrawal from the world—while, in the present, Nathan’s involvement with a shadowy rebel organization is revealed. Unlike a lot of other dystopian fiction, this story’s setting and its technology is fleshed out just enough to be intriguing without feeling excessive; the futuristic way that music is created is especially engrossing. There’s a twist just before the end that some readers may see coming, but Hoffman (perhaps better known by his stage name, Babydaddy, of the glam-rock band Scissor Sisters) still manages to make it compelling. Žeželj’s art style is more abstract than one typically encounters in comics—reminiscent of flyers from punk shows, but more richly colored. It’s an appealingly bold stylistic choice, but it causes a few problems at times, as characters’ faces are sometimes too abstract to recognize. The story itself is moody and introspective, ruminating on such ideas as what it means to be famous, how to use that fame, and what a celebrity owes to the world; however, it avoids feeling self-absorbed. Truly, the biggest downside is that the story ends just as it seems to be getting started.
A thoughtful tale of fame and its power.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781545821060
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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