A first-rate cast headlines this gleefully offbeat piece of speculative fiction.
Soldiers in a mysterious afterlife may be the only ones who can stop a sinister world-threatening force in Arnold’s debut SF/fantasy novel.
United States Army soldier Michael Rene Gostani dies in combat during the Vietnam War. He awakens in a bizarre place that’s seemingly made of his memories. In this apparent land of the dead, Michael discovers an astonishing ability: he can manipulate the environment and form new landscapes. Elsewhere, in the 25th century, Maven Kelly Pear and Sgt. Nathan Doss fight together on the war-torn planet Vitalia. Nathan takes them to a “planted” spaceship-turned-city to recover some “fancy” tech, but he’s really looking for his love, Stephanie, who has disappeared. Two decades prior, in the same spot, 20 million people likewise vanished in what’s called the Great Abduction. Through unforeseen circumstances, Kelly and Nathan wind up in the afterlife, though they aren’t dead. Neither are those 20 million missing individuals, a group the two soldiers are now in the position of potentially freeing from their apparent imprisonment. But they’re in Meridian, which is the otherworldly city that Michael Gostani has created. It’s not so far removed from the war Kelly and Nathan left behind on Vitalia: Another realm, entirely separate from Meridian, is at odds with Michael’s city. And something awful looms on the horizon—the Aberration, a vaguely described entity whose arrival in this afterlife is imminent and who’s reputedly dead set on “wiping out and absorbing all life.”
Obscurity reigns in Arnold’s often murky story—there’s a suggestion that Meridian is Heaven, Hell, and purgatory all rolled into one. This introduces an intriguing dilemma for Nathan, who, as a devoutly religious man, may view Michael as a god. Copious details of the afterlife are left cryptic, from the true nature of the Aberration is (or what it will become) and the ways Kelly and Nathan can combat it to the “humanoids,” both friendly and hostile, who continually pop up. Characters (including Michael) are baffled throughout, with the story offering little clarification. Michael’s abstruseness elevates the narrative tension, as readers may have trouble deciding whether or not he’s a villain. Fortunately, Kelly and Nathan, who have been friends for as long as they’ve been soldiers, ground the story (Kelly, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, is distraught over losing access to the drug helping her cope). In detailing the logic-defying city of Meridian, the author churns out chaotic descriptions brimming with a hodgepodge of images: “The cracking and swooshing sound of conflagration is met with sight of a devastated medieval world: wood and stone and plaster ablaze and flattened, half of a stone dome ceiling collapsed, pieces the size of houses falling and exploding on the ground, black smoke billowing.” The final act provides readers with many, if not all, the answers, and the narrative works as either an opening series installment or a standalone story.
A first-rate cast headlines this gleefully offbeat piece of speculative fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798350900590
Page Count: 426
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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