Sagan may have more imagination than he knows what to do with—a wonderful thing in a new author.
Multiple layers of virtual reality unfold like onion skins in this future-shocker.
In a rather blatant example of genre-plot-staple cross-pollination, first-novelist and screenwriter Sagan (Carl Sagan fils) takes the killer-virus-decimating-humanity-plot, wraps it inside an is-this-real? VR environment and tosses in some moody dark fantasy scene-stealers with a hint of David Bowie’s Space Oddity as the icing on top. Gabriel Hall, a teenager with a morbid imagination (thus his nickname: “Halloween”), attends an exclusive college in the future where he and his small band of classmates spend most of their time in a VR world. The environment they embody, with its field trips spent talking to Charles Darwin, and odd conflicts involving gibbering clones with machine guns and faceless Lovecraftian “nightnauts,” is a fun but frightening place, something like Disneyworld seen through a Hieronymous Bosch filter. Gabe has anxieties at the start of the story, since he doesn’t remember anything about why he’s in the world—a short-circuit in the system temporarily wiped much of his memory—and he believes he might have killed his classmate Lazarus (they all have names like that: Fantasia, Mercutio, Champagne). Sagan occasionally dips out of Gabe’s nightmarish quest for truth to check in with the scientists at Gedaechtnis, a research center connected to Gabe’s school that’s frantically trying to find the cure for Black Ep, a hundred-percent fatal disease that lurked for years in humanity’s DNA and is now sweeping the globe like a scythe. The official reason for all the VR loopiness the students endure is that it’s all education, but after a scene in which Gabe is (virtually) buried alive by Maestro, the VR instructor, it’s pretty obvious that something else is going on behind the scenes. While it might seem a rather lumbering affair when laid out, Idlewild nips along quite nicely, deftly sidestepping the overly drawn-out or too-fraught-with-meaning scenarios one might expect from this apocalyptic masquerade.
Sagan may have more imagination than he knows what to do with—a wonderful thing in a new author.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15097-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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