A highly entertaining romp through high strangeness.
In Bruce’s SF/thriller series entry, weird-news correspondent Alexander Strange is set to get married in a time-twisted version of Florida where prehistoric creatures exist.
The countdown to Christmas has already begun on the island of Goodland, Florida, and all Strange wants to do in the next 10 days is file his special Yuletide dispatches to Tropic Press before the deadline. He’d also like to help his private-eye buddy, Lester Rivers, track down the people responsible for stealing the baby Jesus right out of a local megachurch’s Nativity display. There’s a war on Christmas, apparently, and the megachurch’s crooked pastor isn’t above engaging in nefarious shenanigans to prosecute it. Things turn stranger for Strange when a cutlass-wielding mannequin, which he keeps aboard his houseboat, comes to life and somehow starts communicating with him. “Mona” warns Strange that his girlfriend, Gwenn Giroux—an attorney on important business in Portugal—is in grave danger and will be hurt if he doesn’t get to her quickly. Strange doesn’t immediately grasp that he and the people he loves most dearly have become hopelessly entangled in a nasty case of quantum retrocausality—a phenomenon in which the future is affecting the past. In this case, it involves a disgruntled individual and a shady Florida genetics laboratory known as the Lightgate Institute. When Strange finally reaches Gwenn, there’s an airplane, of all things, bearing down on her. One thing’s for sure: Readers will encounter plenty of scenes of peril before the tale is told. (Also, the stolen baby Jesus will return to the narrative.) Over the course of this novel, Bruce delivers snappy dialogue and crackling prose, and he’s clearly having a great time spinning an intriguing and well-paced adventure story. He also gets high marks for deftly managing the thorny time paradoxes that retrocausality invites, as well as reanimated dinosaurs, skunk apes, and an Elvis Presley impersonator. There’s even James Bond references shaken and stirred into the mix. The story also manages to serve as an unexpectedly warm homage to the state of Florida itself.
A highly entertaining romp through high strangeness.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2023
ISBN: 9798989008506
Page Count: 344
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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