A rousing throwback whose spinning plates never stop, even at the end (cue Volume 2).
Baird and Costner team up with illustrator Ross (Urban Monsters, 2008, etc.) for a globe-trotting yarn of lost cities, secret societies, and privileged fisticuffs, backdropped by World War I.
At center are the Ogdens—brothers John and Arthur, sister Frances. Answering a gentlemanly challenge, Arthur braves the Arctic with his fellow dilettante explorers of the titular guild, and among the “Esquimaux,” Arthur encounters a bright white light, a sunken city, and the onset of a severe wasting condition. News reaches John—a major under the British Viceroy—via Frances’ letter and convinces him to desert his post in Mesopotamia in order to help Arthur by collecting other sufferers of “the Complaint” for examination by the mysterious Mr. Sloane, a dead ringer for a former colleague of John’s who had grievously wronged Fan, was grievously injured himself—then vanished completely. Ever at John’s side are his dragoons—hard drinking, expertly violent, and drawn mainly from the British Isles. Their phonetically spelled accents underscore the emphasis on language, with page upon page filled with rumors, philosophies, and personal histories, in conversation or written correspondence, and threading through it all is a loquacious, omniscient narrator of the “gentle reader” variety. Dense, handsome prose undulates ever forward, textured by floridity and imagination—rival sects; talking islands; massive, uncanny machinery; Inuit Babylons; séances; lost knowledge. The politics also feel ancient, with good-guy Anglos traipsing the globe and embarrassing their enemies, while the women worry or are just strong enough to care for a sickly orphan. Pages split almost evenly between solid text and graphic storytelling, and yet the images—entirely sufficient in an action-figure sort of way—are often used to do no more than deliver dialogue. Nevertheless, with its colorful cast, exotic locales, and intertwined fates, the book slowly addicts.
A rousing throwback whose spinning plates never stop, even at the end (cue Volume 2).Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2739-4
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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