The dystopian ingredients are familiar, but Heathcock combines them in a potent metaphorical stew.
Same hunger, subtler games.
Heathcock’s dystopian tale, set in a near-future America decimated by the ravages of climate change, conjures a haunting mood despite an abundance of familiar tropes. These primarily derive from Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series: Both follow the tribulations of a tough, competent young woman from an impoverished family struggling to survive in a hostile natural setting, plucked from obscurity by a totalitarian system eager to exploit her as a symbol to sway the hearts and minds of a desperate populace. Our protagonist, Mazzy Goodwin, like Katniss Everdeen, is motivated by concern for a younger sister and assisted by a stalwart boy from back home as she navigates the treacherous schemes of an oppressive governing body that cloaks its atrocities in the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. Also like Katniss, who took on the mantle of the Mockingjay, Mazzy embodies an avian theme: She’s called the Seraphine, named for the angelic wings that grow from her back. This is where the two works diverge: Where Collins concentrates on realistic worldbuilding and grounds her heroine in a wealth of naturalistic detail, Heathcock crafts something closer to a fable; Mazzy’s wings are desultorily explained late in the narrative, and the workings of the sinister Novae Terrae, a militaristic cult led by the enigmatic visionary Jo Sam, are conveyed in fleeting glimpses and evoked in poetically vague descriptions. Miraculous technological wonders and climatological disasters buffet the suffering multitudes who, as ever, are subject to the whims of Mother Nature and human nature, equally destructive forces immune to reason. Mazzy remains a passive character through much of the action, becoming embroiled in a revolutionary plot she doesn’t really understand, and her dour, humorless perspective, while understandable, casts a pall over the punishing narrative. Ultimately, though, Heathcock produces striking alchemy from these unpromising elements, as the cumulative impact of elusive, evocative details and a growing sense of moral horror deliver an emotional wallop that leaves the reader feeling unnerved and strangely bereft.
The dystopian ingredients are familiar, but Heathcock combines them in a potent metaphorical stew.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-3741-0023-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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 somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.
As the world dies, the remnants of the patriarchy and their minions keep right on terrorizing the weak.
Caustically original in the same fashion as her chilling Tender Is the Flesh (2020), Bazterrica’s latest devises an end-of-the-world scenario with a Handmaid’s Tale vibe. The most palpable tragedy is that no matter how the world dies, women always seem to end up with the same sorry fortune. The story is set in an unknown wasteland where all the animals on Earth have perished, with callouts to a mysterious, poisonous haze and a collapsed world. Our narrator is a young woman relegated to sheltering in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, an isolated, fundamentalist order subservient to an unseen, deity-like “He,” and divided into strict castes. Among these are the Enlightened, kept isolated from the rest of the order behind a mysterious black door; the Chosen, divine and devoted prophets who are ritually mutilated; and the servants marked by contamination, who sit just below the narrator’s caste, the unworthy young women. The story is a little tough to follow due to the narrator’s fragmented memory, not to mention lots of interruptions from the old ultraviolence and body horror. Although men are banned from the cloistered stronghold, it’s a relentlessly sadistic and violent society ruled by the Superior Sister, enforcer of His will and the instrument of punishment up to and including torture and death. The narrator is already mourning Helena, a spirited iconoclast who couldn’t survive under such oppression, when a new arrival named Lucía sparks fresh hope that may prove as fruitless as everything else in this bleak testament to suffering. As a subversion of expectations and an indictment of unchecked power, it’s unflinching and provocative, but readers expecting a satisfying denouement may be left wanting.
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668051887
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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