Marvelous stagecraft, but not a great play.
Criminal enterprise on a grand scale.
By 2037, the Metaverse has grown up to become Earth+, the digital home to most human activity, while Earth–, the actual world, has been neglected and degraded. One of the primary enterprises of Earth+ is entertainment, and the biggest and most lucrative entertainment venue is Past Crimes, where subscribers can experience simulations of the world’s most notorious crimes. There’s an amusement park (simulated) called Murderland, and though murder predominates there, all manner of mayhem is included. Like streaming television, Past Crimes and its competitors are always seeking new material. Cassie West is an agent of VICE, one of Past Crimes’ competitors; her job is to secure licenses from the families of crime victims, who will then populate new simulations. But, almost as soon as the book begins, Cassie’s world falls apart: Her house burns down with her husband, Harris, inside, and that fire is just one of a number of suicidal conflagrations, collectively called the Blight, that are deemed to have been Harris’ responsibility. Past Crimes swoops in, scoops up the license, and begins to build a new simulation. Cassie believes her husband is innocent of actually inspiring and organizing the Blight, and the plot recounts her efforts to prove this. Past Crimes itself turns out to be a criminal enterprise, and though much deception and violence ensues, Cassie is battered but unbowed. Pinter’s setup offers great opportunities for satirical observations, the most obvious being the national appetite for true crime, and the satiric elements are among the highlights of the book. The extrapolation of the Metaverse into Earth+ is also deft, compelling, and horrifying. Unfortunately, the characterization is less accomplished, the dialogue often wooden, and the plot too reliant on coincidence and serendipity.
Marvelous stagecraft, but not a great play.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781448312122
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 return to form for this popular author.
Spectral danger and human evil stalk Sager’s latest stalwart heroine.
When Maggie Holt’s father, Ewan, dies, she’s shocked to discover that she has inherited Baneberry Hall. Ewan made his name as a writer—and ruined her life—by writing a supposedly nonfiction account of the terrors their family endured while living in this grand Victorian mansion with a dark history. Determined to find out the truth behind her father’s sensational bestseller, Maggie returns to Baneberry Hall. Horror aficionados will feel quite cozy as they settle into this narrative, and Sager’s fans will recognize a familiar formula. As he has in his previous three novels, the author makes contemporary fiction out of time-honored tropes. Final Girls (2017) remains his most fresh and inventive novel, but his latest is significantly more satisfying than the two novels that followed. Interspersing Maggie’s story with chapters from her father’s book, Sager delivers something like a cross between The Haunting of Hill House and The Amityville Horror with a tough female protagonist. Ewan and Maggie both behave with the dogged idiocy common among people who buy haunted houses, but doubt about the veracity of Ewan’s book and Maggie’s desperate need to understand her own past make them both compelling characters. The ghosts and poltergeist activity Sager conjures are truly chilling, and he does a masterful job of keeping readers guessing until the very end. As was the case with past novels, though—especially The Last Time I Lied (2018)—Sager sets his story in the present while he seems to be writing about the past. For example, when the Holt family moved into Baneberry Hall in 1995 or thereabouts, Ewan—a professional journalist—worked on a typewriter. When Maggie wants to learn more about the history of Baneberry Hall, she drives to the town library instead of going online. Sager is already asking readers to suspend disbelief, and he makes that more difficult because it’s such a jolt when a character pulls out an iPhone or mentions eBay. This is, however, a minor complaint about what is a generally entertaining work of psychological suspense.
A return to form for this popular author.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4517-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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