A page-turning horror exploring (and adding to) New England folklore and myth.
A Gulf War veteran struggles to keep his family together—and his sanity intact—when faced with multiple crises in Alo’s horror novel.
Curtis Reynolds is not a happy man. An overworked third-shift laborer who spends weeks, sometimes months, away from his wife and child, Reynolds is summoned home when a hurricane traveling up the East Coast is predicted to travel dangerously near his family’s Connecticut house, which is located on a river. He dreads returning to an estranged wife and a crumbling marriage, a child with special needs, a pile of bills, a flooded basement, and a house that’s in the process of being lost to eminent domain due to a mysterious project funded by the government. Suffering from past war trauma (“The surrounding men, including himself, lay speckled in shrapnel, surrounded by a smoldering blur of twisted metal”) as well as nightmares associated with a woman he killed while driving drunk years earlier, Reynolds is not prepared for what he discovers on his street, already being battered by the storm: brutally murdered neighbors, destroyed houses, roaming colonies of feral cats, and a nightmarish beast stuck in his basement that simply can’t be real. With his sanity possibly slipping, Reynolds investigates and finds revelations in an abandoned neighborhood across the river. There’s a lot to like here: Alo’s writing is focused and fluid, creating a fast-paced and action-packed narrative that never flags. His adept ability to intertwine multiple threads of tension—the raging storm, PTSD-induced hallucinations, nightmarish creatures, marital conflict, and secret government installations—keeps the intensity impressively high throughout, weaving a thick tapestry of terror. One quibble: The overuse of description in places sometimes slows the narrative momentum. Still, the jaw-dropping plot twists will keep readers on the edges of their seats.
A page-turning horror exploring (and adding to) New England folklore and myth.Pub Date: March 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781088097984
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A smart and smart-alecky tale of technology put to bad ends by bad people..
Horror writer Tremblay shifts gears for a provocative exercise in postmodern SF.
Julia Flang is a young San Fernando Valley slacker unmotivated enough to do the Dude proud, and indeed The Big Lebowski is her favorite movie. It’s another old movie, though, that gives her the code name for the lucrative task her Big Tech mogul of an estranged mother assigns her: Weekend at Bernie’s. Julia’s Bernie is an employee who’s fallen into a coma and, now “mostly dead,” has been fitted with “proprietary technology” that can get him to a lab on the other side of the country; Julia, a pro-level video gamer, has just the joystick chops to steer him, zombielike, via remote control, through airports and down city streets. A shroud of secrecy and paranoia surrounds Bernie, and for good reason: A journalist who waylays Julia raises the prospect that while Bernie—who has a real name, as Julia learns—may prove an interesting case study in the workings of consciousness, it’s also entirely possible that the corporation has more nefarious designs (“Is it a huge leap,” our journalist asks, “to think weapons contractors wouldn’t be dreaming about remote-control soldiers?”). Though Julia is given to falling back on bits of Coen brothers dialogue—“Lotta strands to keep in old Duder’s head”—in times of stress, she’s not without inner resources. Neither, it turns out, is Bernie, who, while not exactly having a mind of his own, “a robot wearing the permeable armor of failing human flesh,” certainly proves a package that’s hard to handle. It all makes for an entertaining shaggy dog, or maybe shaggy sheep, tale, though it won’t come as a surprise that Tremblay ends it all on a nicely gory note.
A smart and smart-alecky tale of technology put to bad ends by bad people..Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9780063398467
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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