Worth a try for fans of the genre, but start with Book 1, Journey into the Flame.
The unexciting middle installment in the author’s Rising World trilogy.
The Great Disruption of 2027 tilted the Earth’s axis by 4 degrees, unleashing massive death and destruction. In 2030, the survivors must deal with aftereffects such as widespread illness and earthquakes that lack epicenters. Can humanity make a comeback? “The Rising is over,” a character states. “Now we must see if the wager on mankind was well placed….Even the simple act of loving someone is risky.” Key to the Earth’s recovery are the Chronicles of Satraya and learning how to “unearth the secret of free energy.” Bad People will kill to control the Chronicles, which dispense such wisdom as “Mind is Mind.” Pyramids will generate electricity, a fact known to the ancient Egyptians. Exactly how the ancients used that power is not obvious, but no matter. Much is made of the real-life Nicola Tesla’s experiments with electricity, which helps cover the story’s flapdoodle with a veneer of science. For example, there are three kinds of resonances mentioned that turn out to be real, like the Schumann resonance—is the Earth out of tune? The characters are straightforward with the notable exception(s) of doctors Josef and Rosa, mixed-gender twins conjoined at the head. They have one superhigh-IQ brain between them and routinely finish each other’s sentences. They might be the worst character concept inflicted on innocent readers in many a yarn, but kudos to the author for daring to try. In the end, though, it’s an imaginative book with elements of science fiction, futurism and fantasy. The pace and storytelling are good, and the author makes effective use of Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. The ending sets up the series finale, with more foul deeds afoot.
Worth a try for fans of the genre, but start with Book 1, Journey into the Flame.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1341-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
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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