An engrossing tale of reincarnated super-beings in search of meaning and love.
In this debut SF romance, two bodiless, immortal entities roaming the universe must repeatedly rediscover each other when their race decides to limit itself to a planet-bound mortal existence and fleeting memories.
Myers’ novel posits that a vast population of billions of elemental minds—life forms of “the Ethereal Universe”—explores the cosmos, occasionally entering the bodies of biological beings, usually primates, to enjoy physical sensations and emotions. Among the entities who indulge themselves are passionate mates Falin and Xin. Another of their species proposes a recreational challenge: The Ethereal spirits will migrate en masse into mortal creatures, shedding memories of eternal existence and limiting themselves to animal perceptions. Then, they must deduce the way back to their true Ethereal nature. Everyone thoughtlessly joins this “game,” and Falin and Xin bid farewell in what is assumed a temporary separation. The action moves to an Earthlike planet, home to assorted, largely flawed communities. Scott Daniels (Falin) matures in a totalitarian, socialist dictatorship, with everybody genetically engineered to serve the monolithic Corporation. Scott, naturally curious, voices skepticism about the establishment and suffers the loss of his fast-track career and his lover, Denise, a Corporation-indoctrinated woman. Scott vagabonds his way through assorted nation states, searching for a mythic Tower wherein answers supposedly await perennial questions (“Who am I? What am I? How did I get here? Where did I come from? Where am I going?”). Meanwhile, he’s brutalized in a militaristic culture coveting conscripts for its “fake war” and imprisoned for 15 years by a Roman Catholic–style inquisition whose faith he criticizes. He also finds romance—usually ill-fated—with girlfriends who seem to present facets of Xin until he finally partners with a woman named Audrey. Unevenly paced, with sometimes years of narrative flitting by in a few sentences, this metaphysical, allegorical odyssey skillfully grafts the New Agey romanticism of Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever, 1984) onto a Swiftian (light on the satire) tour of assorted dysfunctional societies that exposes their Western civilization–type foibles. Will transcendental true love prevail over petty nationalism, greed, dogma, and so forth? Things do wrap up by the end of the engaging story, but readers keen on the love fantasia should know the book is heralded as the first installment of a two-part saga.
An engrossing tale of reincarnated super-beings in search of meaning and love.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2024
ISBN: 9798343895100
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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