A creatively accomplished, atmospheric, and gripping adrenaline rush for monster fans.
A man and a teenage girl defend themselves against packs of bloodthirsty mutants in Csák’s zombie thriller.
The author’s epic debut captures the terror and the desperation of an apocalyptic America. It follows two standout protagonists who must battle their way across lands infested with mutant beasts. It’s been seven years since the great “Breakdown” occurred, in which a mysterious pandemic caused humans to mutate into bloodthirsty, animalistic monsters who roam the countryside and are eager to kill. Jake Armstrong, nicknamed Cassius by his “long dead friends,” bands together with teenage Abigail to contend with the looming threats of the wastelands they traverse. Cassius unofficially adopted Abigail when her mother and a group of small children were bitten by ravenous creatures and transformed into vicious, zombielike creatures. After training her to use automatic weaponry, the fierce duo strategize, shoot, and slash their way through deadly regions, searching for the rumored safe colony sanctuary they hope to call their home. Csák wastes no time setting up the premise and placing his engrossing characters immediately on the defensive against hordes of “ferals” who “could smell uninfected blood from a distance and wouldn’t give up the taste of flesh.” The narrative twists and turns its way to a breathtaking finale—in tense, cinematic action scenes, natural elements conspire with the threat of inhuman beasts to create sequence after sequence of stark survival and bloodshed. The novel is a sharp character study as well: Cassius and Abigail often lock horns over what’s most important to them and their differing methods to secure their futures in an ultraviolent, uncertain world full of malignant monsters. Regular watchers of the television series Z Nation and The Last of Us will find much to savor in this pulse-raising thriller.
A creatively accomplished, atmospheric, and gripping adrenaline rush for monster fans.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9786150174457
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Writing Systems Kft.
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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