A nimbly constructed story that starkly explores the dangers of neuroscience run amok.
With shades of Philip K. Dick, a dystopian novel that probes the darker corners of the mind.
Stanley Webb is in a bad way, as so many of his age: He’s in a memory ward, sinking into dementia, leaving his wife to tend single-handedly to a house that’s too large for her. Maggie—the true hero of Binge’s involving novel—is the second person to speak in the story; the first is a disembodied voice that announces, “I’m Hassan. Do you remember me?” Hassan offers an unsettling thought: Stanley isn’t suffering from Alzheimer’s, but instead, holed up in a nursing home cheerily called Sunrise, he’s having his memories selectively harvested. Someone is looking for something, that is, and that something goes all the way back to Stanley’s school days, when a mad-scientist tutor recruits him and two other teens, Raph and Jacques, into a secret project that’s designed to expand their memories—for, as Stanley brightly puts it, “If memory is what makes us human, then surely being able to remember more makes us more human.” Soon enough Stanley, competing with his friends, is memorizing pi to the thousandths of places, memorizing Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet is an important leitmotif—and learning all about the concept called the apeiron, which, Stanley hazards, is “kind of like whatever existed before the big bang.” Fast-forward to an adult future, and it’s now Jacques’ turn to play the role of mad scientist—mad with a bent toward some very apocalyptic ends and, as he assures Maggie, quite prepared to “roll Stanley in here and slice open his throat in front of you.” Time travel, mass extinction, the end of the world: It’s all here in a storyline that twists and turns like a spacecraft in a wormhole, rocketing toward an unforeseeable and unresolved ending.
A nimbly constructed story that starkly explores the dangers of neuroscience run amok.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593852163
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.
A woman fears she made a fatal mistake by taking in a blood-soaked tween during a storm.
High winds and torrential rain are forecast for “The Middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire,” making Casey question the structural integrity of her ramshackle rental cabin. Still, she’s loath to seek shelter with her lecherous landlord or her paternalistic neighbor, so instead she just crosses her fingers, gathers some candles, and hopes for the best. Casey is cooking dinner when she notices a light in her shed. She grabs her gun and investigates, only to find a rail-thin girl hiding in the corner under a blanket. She’s clutching a knife with “Eleanor” written on the handle in black marker, and though her clothes are bloody, she appears uninjured. The weather is rapidly worsening, so before she can second-guess herself, former Boston-area teacher Casey invites the girl—whom she judges to be 12 or 13—inside to eat and get warm. A wary but starving Eleanor accepts in exchange for Casey promising not to call the police—a deal Casey comes to regret after the phones go down, the power goes out, and her hostile, sullen guest drops something that’s a big surprise. Meanwhile, in interspersed chapters labeled “Before,” middle-schooler Ella befriends fellow outcast Anton, who helps her endure life in Medford, Massachusetts, with her abusive, neglectful hoarder of a mother. As per her usual, McFadden lulls readers using a seemingly straightforward thriller setup before launching headlong into a series of progressively seismic (and increasingly bonkers) plot twists. The visceral first-person, present-tense narrative alternates perspectives, fostering tension and immediacy while establishing character and engendering empathy. Ella and Anton’s relationship particularly shines, its heartrending authenticity counterbalancing some of the story’s soapier turns.
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781464260919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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
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