If you want a hint of where Hrbek is going, thematically, with this story, look to the title of a short story collection...
In which unthinkable calamity propels a nation—and a family—into a rapidly imploding dystopia and slow-motion apocalypse.
It begins with what seems at first like a plane heading for the Golden Gate Bridge, except that it’s “too bright” to be a plane but more “like something cosmic come at high speed through the atmosphere.” Whatever it is, Skyler Wakefield, a 20-year-old college student and aspiring novelist, sees it shatter the bridge and bathe everything around it in near-blinding radioactive heat. Years after San Francisco and most of its inhabitants perish, America is a tense, fragmented society of colonies, territories, and prairie internment camps for Muslims. (Early reports alleged the words “Air Arabia” could be seen on the projectile that hit the bridge.) Skyler’s baby brother, Dorian, is 12 years old and haunted by dreams of a dead sister who the rest of his still-traumatized family insists never existed. Meanwhile, the family’s next-door neighbor, a 71-year-old veteran of something called Gulf War III, has made his way to one of the detention centers to adopt a Muslim orphan named Karim, who’s the same age as Dorian—who, as it happens, is cultivating a hard-core prejudice against Muslims. His impromptu expression of an ethnic slur at a backyard barbecue leads to a bloody fight between him and Karim. More grievances accumulate, leading to more bigotry and malign conspiracies on both sides of the American and Arab divide...and greater horrors to come. Hrbek’s (Destroy All Monsters, 2011, etc.) engagement with themes of loss and recovery and his vibrantly lyrical prose style reach a peak in this dark, allusive fantasy, which seems intended as a metaphor for the anxieties still lurking in our post–9/11 universe. As one of the book’s characters says, “What are we living in now, if not fear?” Which, as Hrbek implies (and FDR once famously proclaimed), may itself be a worse enemy than any other we can find, or contrive, for ourselves.
If you want a hint of where Hrbek is going, thematically, with this story, look to the title of a short story collection written about 80 years ago in an America far different from ours: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-453-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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 breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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