Despite a few missteps, an involving, tense, and visceral near-future thriller.
In this debut sci-fi novel, a doctor stumbles on a government conspiracy involving human experimentation.
In 2087, American society has been changed by the Great Purge—a temporary collapse of the social safety net orchestrated by anti-government forces—and an electromagnetic pulse called the Blackout that wiped out all digitally recorded learning. Today, few own books or are even literate, instead using screens that display “simplified and dumbed down Gliffs,” part pictograph, part acronym. Nearly everyone, in the Eastern United States at least, uses an implanted Atman approved by the Bureau of Wellness. Dr. Joe Barnes is one of the few to prefer a handheld device, suspicious of how the implant might affect the body’s electrical currents. When patients at Joe’s hospital start dying suddenly, he’s compelled to investigate, and soon turns up troubling clues. Though aided by his irascible elderly mentor as well as his best friend, a detective, Joe runs up against a flinty hospital bureaucracy backed by powerful forces. Yet the hospital also is caring for his wife, Mary, pregnant after many years of trying. Joe must use a paper dossier that he can barely read to understand—and try to stop—horrifying medical experiments on human subjects linked to World War II atrocities. In his novel, Augenstein draws readers in with Joe’s narrative voice; he’s a decent, good-hearted, hardworking man who is determined to do right by his patients. The historical basis for the tale’s medical horrors lends them an appalling credence, underscored by glimpses of a debased, cruel popular culture as seen in a reality show that’s slightly reminiscent of Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian (1969). But some plot elements don’t seem well thought out; in 68 years, will people still chuckle about patients who sexually harass nurses or have “marijuana misdemeanors”? It seems odd that paper, seemingly indispensable in a Blackout, would disappear so fast. And naming Joe’s “sidekick nurse” “Betty Bathory” signals what should be a surprise twist.
Despite a few missteps, an involving, tense, and visceral near-future thriller.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2019
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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