A violent, hallucinatory espionage tale that repeatedly leaves readers questioning its protagonist’s reality.
A chameleonlike parahuman, created in a secret project, discovers grotesque crimes and mutations in future Phoenix, Arizona, in Hetzel’s SF series starter.
Agent 42 is the creation of a secret U.S. government project in a vaguely described post-catastrophe future America. He and those like him are cyber-enhanced, resilient, and able to shape-shift; they go on missions involving impersonating people and infiltrating enemy organizations. But Agent 42’s latest mission, masquerading as an Albanian gangster, seems to go badly wrong: Technologically advanced attackers descend on the criminals’ hideout and massacre everyone in sight, apparently seeking Agent 42. The hero escapes into the netherworld of Phoenix, but he stays in touch with his Agency handlers as he stumbles on numerous horrors. For example, a new drug called Green Tar physically transforms and mutates addicts in the manner of a virus; a messianic/apocalyptic cult implants its members with surveillance chips; and a curious network of tunnels runs underneath the metropolis, some holding cannibalistic marauders. Along the way, Agent 42 finds cryptic philosophical messages apparently left for him in unlikely locations (“We are all guilty of existence. We must all plead our case before the court of history”). He believes he’s being hunted, but is it all a cruel training exercise, an elaborate loyalty test, or an internal purge meant to kill him? Readers are tipped off rather early that Agent 42’s “mindsculpted” superior perceptions may not be feeding him the most accurate information about what is really happening to him. Fans weaned on Philip K. Dick’s conspiracies-within-conspiracies brand of SF paranoia or Robert Ludlum’s identity-scrambled spy thrillers should enjoy this caper in spite of—or perhaps because of—its more extreme splatterpunk elements. Future installments should determine whether the author is spreading out an elaborate puzzle plot or a simpler gallery of horrors. Along the way, the story explores perennial questions that genre fans are sure to find familiar, including such topics as what it means to be human—or at least quasi-human.
A violent, hallucinatory espionage tale that repeatedly leaves readers questioning its protagonist’s reality.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5217-5346-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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