A crisply written, inventive, complicated brew of a novel, though one that could have used some boiling down.
An intriguing and deftly plotted (if overstuffed) hybrid of dystopian SF, medical thriller, and queer romance.
Chaotic, irreverent Sunil Rao, an ex–MI6 agent plucked from jail for the assignment, and cool, analytical, ultraorderly Adam Rubenstein, an American intelligence officer, have worked together before under extremely trying circumstances, and when a bizarre series of events unfolds at a U.S. air base in Britain, culminating in the sudden appearance in the countryside of a full-sized generic American diner, the two are reunited to investigate. Rao has the uncanny ability not only to detect lies, but to intuit the truth of anything said in his presence, and the buttoned-up Adam is the only person he can't read, an inscrutability that makes their collaboration possible and creates odd-couple tension. Soon they land at a top-secret lab in Colorado, on the trail of a new pharmacologic substance called Prophet. The drug, which resembles mercury, has the effect of spontaneously creating comfort objects from the nostalgic memories of those exposed to it...but with horrendous side effects: The affected person disappears down the rabbit hole of the memory, plunging into a comalike state, sometimes even dying. Worse, those effects—aided by reckless experimentation—are intensifying; the protean substance keeps evolving unpredictably. Adam and Rao turn out to be perfectly suited to the investigation; after an initial exposure, the former is immune to Prophet (it even shrinks from him), and the latter proves able to extract and assimilate the drug. The book’s first section feels a bit languid and talky, but the pace accelerates in the middle, and the long final action sequence, in which Rao, Adam, and a team of military contractors negotiate a bizarre, surreal, deadly desert landscape of plush toys (some of them animate), bicycles, arcade games, golden apple trees, and the like, is excellent: pulse-pounding, philosophically fascinating, even blackly funny. The romance plot feels both fresh (in who its principals are) and creaky (there's too much slow-on-the-uptake and swelling music).
A crisply written, inventive, complicated brew of a novel, though one that could have used some boiling down.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780802162021
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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