Dark, indelible, and gleefully unsettling tales.
SF, horror, and dark fantasy intermingle in Schrader’s collection of short stories.
The narrator of the book’s opening tale lives a life in chains. He survives by feeding on human flesh—and, in doing so, apparently saves the world. The 11 stories that follow don’t lighten the mood much. People line up for the latest fad in “Chop,” which involves a large knife, and family vacations seem like a bad idea considering what near-future airports require for travel in “I’m Ready To Affirm You Now, Gamma.” While Schrader plays around with genres, it’s all consistently disconcerting and scary stuff. Characters persistently wind up in harrowing circumstances or, as the title suggests, face some horrible, disturbing truth. The author maintains an atmosphere of dread; in a typically tense passage from “The Floating Brain,” he writes, “Bits of a broken light bulb crunched underfoot as she pushed open the exit door and stepped out onto the dirt field, passing the lone pole with a badly sun-scorched tetherball attached to a decaying rope….” The two standout stories are also the longest. “Hondo Rane and the City of Illusion,” in which a towering barbarian returns to his hometown to protect a family heirloom from falling into villainous hands, is superb, violent fantasy. “The Floating Brain,” which closes the book, unfolds on a dystopian Earth where a teenager plans to use a special gift to combat a giant, tentacled floating brain that devours humans who rebel against the government. Both of these offerings deftly condense vast worlds into taut narratives and could easily be spun off into additional stories or even full series. Some of the material tiptoes into familiar horror/SF terrain, as when someone is convinced that a scarecrow is stalking them (“Jack Nasty on the Wind”), but the author casts a spell with sharp, concise prose and climaxes that will rattle most readers.
Dark, indelible, and gleefully unsettling tales.Pub Date: May 26, 2023
ISBN: 9798987498309
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Bad People Publications
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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