Like the giant alien artifact in the story, this novel is so much more than the sum of its parts—a page-turner of the...
This stellar debut novel—revolving around a top-secret project to assemble the ancient body parts of a giant humanoid relic buried throughout the world by aliens—masterfully blends together elements of sci-fi, political thriller and apocalyptic fiction.
The story begins in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where a young girl named Rose Franklin falls into a huge hole and literally lands in the palm of a giant metal hand. The government gets involved, but after failing to glean any military or technological secrets from the alien artifact, the hand eventually goes into storage. Years later, after the project is demilitarized, the University of Chicago takes over the research. The head of the project is no other than the South Dakota girl who fell into the hand—now grown and an acclaimed physicist. When other body parts are discovered throughout the country—and the world—Franklin’s formidable task is to somehow secretly unearth all parts, covertly remove them from their locations and transport them to an underground facility in Denver. But when the rest of the world discovers the plan, paranoia, fear and greed run rampant, pushing humankind to the brink of world war. Because the novel is narrated through a series of interviews, personal journals and mission logs, the grand-scale storyline immediately becomes intimate as readers experience the historic events through the eyes of characters like Franklin; Kara Resnik, a U.S. Army pilot tasked with finding a way to “drive” the robot, which may or may not be a colossal weapon of mass destruction; and Vincent Couture, a Quebecois linguist whose mission is to make sense of the alien symbols on panels found with some of the body parts.
Like the giant alien artifact in the story, this novel is so much more than the sum of its parts—a page-turner of the highest order!Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88669-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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