A well-realized work of near-future fiction that echoes timely themes.
In Maristatter’s dystopian debut novel, a young woman seeks shelter from a theocratic American regime.
Meryn Flint is 18 years old, but she’s not legally allowed to move out of her parents’ house. According to the patriarchal laws of the Christian States of America, Meryn must wait until her stepfather, Ray Esselin, finds her a husband. However, when Ray, in a drunken rage, kills Meryn’s mother for burning some pork chops, Meryn must leave home for her own safety. When she does so, she steps into a world in which she has no rights and few people she can trust. The society is divided into multiple castes, and the most privileged take advantage of genetic engineering. Meryn, however, is a member of the Worker Caste with little hope of advancement. She can either marry her former boyfriend—the well-connected but violent Steffan Hagen—or go rogue and join the off-grid community of Tin Town, where widows and other outcasts build their own houses from scavenged materials. Meryn chooses the latter, and for once in her life, she feels part of a proper community. But will it be enough to keep her safe and free from men who would do her harm? Maristatter’s prose is urgent and imaginative over the course of this novel, and the dystopia it fleshes out is frightfully intricate. In this passage, for instance, Meryn walks through Tin Town for the first time: “The muddy board sidewalk beneath our feet ran the length of the town, its sections uneven and cracked….A door slammed, its metallic screech harsh in the morning air. I caught the reek of stale beer and ‘kitty,’ a synthetic (and illegal) khat drug popular with the Indigent Caste.” Readers will detect shades of such works as Margaret Atwood’s 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale and other works of feminist speculative fiction, and, much like the authors of those stories, Maristatter crafts a tale that’s as believable as it is disturbing. It isn’t always subtle, but it’s unquestionably immersive and memorably wrought.
A well-realized work of near-future fiction that echoes timely themes.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2022
ISBN: 9798986631110
Page Count: 342
Publisher: NiffyCat Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 ridiculous concept imbued with gravity, charm, humor, plausible cynicism, and pathos—and perhaps the merest touch of spite.
A Wallace & Gromit dream is more of a nightmare in this darkly farcical science fantasy in which the moon inexplicably becomes…well, not green, but decidedly dairy.
When the moon and every lunar sample on Earth transform into a cheese-like substance, it seems amusing at first, but the appearance of this newly organic, extremely unstable satellite has far-reaching, apocalyptic consequences. A variety of U.S. citizens—disappointed astronauts from newly cancelled lunar missions, scientists whose understanding of the universe has been entirely upended, writers frantically adapting their pitches, retirees at a rural diner finding solace in their friendship, a small church community looking for divine answers, bickering cheese-shop owners whose product gets both welcome and unwelcome attention, the ultra-wealthy owner of an aerospace company with a spectacularly self-involved agenda, bank executives seeking a financial angle, and government officials desperately scheduling press conferences—respond in ways grand and petty, generous and self-serving. Those responses can only escalate when a cheesy lunar fragment threatens to destroy all life on our planet. Scalzi’s premise is absurd, but it’s merely the pretext to take a multifaceted, satiric look at how Americans deal with large-scale crisis, something we’re abundantly and recently familiar with, and will no doubt experience again in the not-so-distant future. He writes of denial, conspiracy theories, anger directed at the wrong people, unscrupulous political machinations, and multiple attempts at profiting from the end of the world, for as long as it lasts. There are moments of unexpected kindness and generosity, too. Of course, Scalzi takes aim at his favorite corporate, social, and government targets, as well as at the cheap sentiment that crisis always seems to inspire (as exemplified by a catastrophic Saturday Night Live episode).
A ridiculous concept imbued with gravity, charm, humor, plausible cynicism, and pathos—and perhaps the merest touch of spite.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780765389091
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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