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LIQUID SNAKES

Name: LIQUID SNAKES
Author: Stephen Kearse
ISBN: 9781593767518

by Stephen Kearse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2023

A dry, devilish amalgam of science fiction, whodunit, horror, social satire, and cautionary tale.

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An espresso-dark saga of retribution, addiction, hard science, racial justice, toxic death—and black coffee—plays itself out quirkily in and around contemporary Atlanta.

Just as most of us are getting back to living (more or less) normal lives in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, here comes a novel that envisages an outrageous, eerily plausible human-made plague festering in the same city where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is headquartered. A gifted Black high school student has somehow chemically dissolved into a dark, acrid substance. For tough-minded CDC investigators Ebonee McCollum and Lauretta Vickers, it’s just the beginning of a vexing inquiry into a series of similar deaths and disappearances that may be rooted in a case years before of “Black death” in a predominantly African American section of Mobile, Alabama, where generations of residents died of cancer before their 60s, likely because of industrial waste from nearby companies. One possible casualty of that slow-motion environmental calamity was the stillborn daughter of Kenny Bomar and Maddy Tusk, now-divorced chemists. Kenny is currently applying his alchemical gifts primarily to his Decatur coffee shop and to fashioning and peddling exotic variations of designer drugs. As one narrative strain follows Ebonee and Retta along their probe into what seems like a baffling epidemic of suicide-through-chemistry, a concurrent strain involves Kenny’s eccentric self-destructive tendencies, primarily his self-injections of venom from various species of snake and a phone app of his devising called EightBall, which started out as a memorial for his daughter but became an addictive means of both communicating with and eavesdropping on its users, including some of the people who morphed into black goo. It becomes clear that Kenny is ultimately out for revenge against the company he blames for his daughter’s death. But even after that revelation, there are many more questions than answers in Kearse’s enigmatic narrative, whose deadpan tone and sudden eruptions of bizarre violence often evoke the allusive, baleful essences of J.G. Ballard’s grimly visionary speculative fiction but with wittier dialogue and robustly seasoned with a rapier-keen perception of the collective psyche and complex aspirations of the Black intelligentsia.

A dry, devilish amalgam of science fiction, whodunit, horror, social satire, and cautionary tale.

Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023

ISBN: 9781593767518

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Soft Skull Press

Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023

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TENDER IS THE FLESH

by Agustina Bazterrica translated by Sarah Moses ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 4, 2020

An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.

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A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.

Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.

An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.

Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020

Categories:

DYSTOPIAN FICTION | LITERARY FICTION

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PRESUMED GUILTY

by Scott Turow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 2025

An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.

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Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.

Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.

An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.