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BROKEN MIRROR

A fantastic SF thriller with a sincere and important message.

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In Sisco’s speculative novel, a young man who wants to find his grandfather’s killer is deemed a threat due to his mental illness.

Several years ago, in an alternate history set in the “American Union of Nations,” a man with a mental illness known as Mirror Resonance Syndrome (MRS) killed people in an act of chaos and extreme violence in the town of Carmichael. In the incident’s aftermath came the Carmichael edicts, which have since subjugated those with MRS (sufferers are hyper-emotional and prone to daydreaming and periods of mental blankness) to being treated as less than human, looked at with suspicion, and forced to live on “ranches” they can never leave. Despite being part of the famous Eastmore family (his grandfather, Jefferson Eastmore, cured cancer), Victor has effectively had his life stolen from him due to his MRS diagnosis. Jefferson died recently, and Victor believes he was murdered—maybe even assassinated—and he wants to find who was responsible. Victor’s mental illness may be the key to the mystery; his friend Ozie tells him that Jefferson was trying to challenge the status quo for the treatment of those with MRS (he wanted to find a cure), a position that’s widely considered radical and may have made him some enemies. The country is also beset by the rise of addiction to drugs known as stims, which have had serious, ongoing consequences for people like Victor’s friend Elena (“She could tell him about the flood of stims the Corps had unleashed to hook as many people as possible”) and, by extension, Victor himself. Sisco has created an immersive cyberpunk world as the setting for an elaborate murder mystery and conspiracy thriller; the copious amount of worldbuilding detail is truly impressive. Victor is a relatable hero with eclectic friends in Ozie and Elena (as well as an herbalist, Pearl, who aids him in dealing with the symptoms of his condition). The world and the characters work together to effectively form a cohesive story about how easy it is for society to classify a group of people as dangerous outsiders.

A fantastic SF thriller with a sincere and important message.

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2024

ISBN: 9781953954077

Page Count: 402

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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THE BOOK OF ELSEWHERE

A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.

In which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday.

“Memory is a labyrinth.” Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Miéville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter’s “weird fiction” subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He’s not nice: “That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone,” warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer—early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, “I kill and kill and kill again,” adding that he’d really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he’s not so much immortal as “infinitely mortal.” B, as one might imagine, isn’t the life of the party—and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly (“A gush of cream-­ and rust-­colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water”). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It’s not always easy to follow, but it’s clear that Reeves and Miéville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language (“the huff-­huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be”).

A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.

Pub Date: July 23, 2024

ISBN: 9780593446591

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Del Rey

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024

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