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
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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