Like a hive bereft of its queen, Sallis’ world buzzes endlessly with worker bees and drones.
A retrospective banquet of 154 stories, including 11 never published before, from a novelist who’s always been something of a miniaturist.
The aptly titled “Abeyance,” the longest by far of the new stories, cuts back and forth between Hannah Martyn, a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit, and her colleague Moira Jarosz, who’s vanished from the NICU ward and her home. As usual in Sallis’ work, the plot is secondary to the evocation of an impossibly teeming world in which Hannah’s search for Moira competes with the equally urgent rhythms of infants struggling for breath; couples trying their best to conceive; passing interactions with friends, neighbors, and family members; haunting dreams and memories; and the general sense of a world in which, as Moira reflects, “change is the constant….You’re forever opening doors then standing there hoping it won’t come in.” Several of the other new stories provide especially notable epiphanies. The narrator of “Blood Draw” ruefully acknowledges that having good veins hasn’t prepared him for what comes next. The sorely distracted husband of “Silver” frets about what steps to take with his wife, who has early-onset dementia. The teacher turned monster-killer in “All My Grendels in a Row” reflects on his vocation to serve and protect. “Billy Deliver’s Last Twelve Novels” devotes one teasing paragraph to each of those novels. A ritualistic conversation about “what we leave behind” in “How the World Got To Be” leads the narrator to wonder whether words will save or damn us. And the narrator’s contract with Rerun Inc. to provide a do-over of his unfortunate last three days in “How I Came To Be,” an homage to a classic Ray Bradbury story, leads to far more public calamities.
Like a hive bereft of its queen, Sallis’ world buzzes endlessly with worker bees and drones.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781641295543
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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