A vividly realized, gory, and gripping SF action adventure.
An outer-space janitor must use electronic music to battle a zombie outbreak in Dee’s horror comedy.
It’s Sam’s last day as the janitor aboard an intergalactic space station, and his best friend Kai is throwing a retirement party to celebrate. But things quickly go south when a mysterious epidemic turns the station’s residents into zombielike creatures that feed on flesh and subsume victims into a giant mega-monster. The only thing that makes them stop is loud electronic music. Armed with only a space suit and a glitchy DJ app, Sam must vanquish these beasts through the power of bass. Dee’s fast-paced tale flings readers right into the action, resulting in a lean, propulsive horror thriller that’s light on exposition and heavy on gore, but Sam’s profane internal monologue is engaging enough to make readers feel invested in the outcome. The mission-based structure makes each chapter feel like a level in a particularly graphic video game (think the popular 2007 game Portal, as produced by filmmaker David Cronenberg). Lots of clever twists diversify the action; for example, Sam’s suit muffles most external sounds, so all the dialogue is shown via garbled tablet texts, as when the first victim exclaims, “[Mac what stop are going you doing on].” The layout of the station can be unclear at times, and the spare backstory leaves some questions unanswered, but most readers will be too caught up in the onslaught of obstacles to dwell on these relatively minor issues. The monsters are particularly terrifying, and Dee clearly relishes their grotesque design. If a sentence like “Yuck, the open mouths of the faces in his belly now resemble irregularly spaced pustules, seeping thick pus-like drool” doesn’t spark readers’ interest, this may not be the book for them—but fans of SF and body horror will find this to be a delightfully brisk read.
A vividly realized, gory, and gripping SF action adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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