Is it sci-fi? A viral thriller? Yes and no, and while not for every taste, a pleasure for the experimentally minded.
A genre-hopping, time-jumping, crowd-pleasing chain novel under the curation of old master Martin, he of Game of Thrones fame.
Low Chicago is a card game, but it’s also a fine description of the demimonde-haunting characters who turn up at the Palmer House at the beginning of this octoauthorial extravaganza. One is John Nighthawk, “a smallish black man in a dark pin-striped suit with a discreet kidskin glove on his left hand.” A discreet glove? Well, roll with it. Nighthawk, who’s spent time on the road and time in the big city, has had unusual powers since 1946. Others gathered around the card table include an actor who starred alongside John Wayne and a gigantic mutant half of whom is “an anthropomorphic version of a Bengal tiger.” You’d think that someone with such distinctive markings would call attention to himself in the Loop, but when said someone is under the aegis of a gangster named Giovanni Galante and a moll named Cynder, “an ace with a potent flame-wielding ability,” people tend to look the other way. When the story gets into time travel in earnest, it’s sometimes a little hard to keep track of where we are and why we’re there with, say, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy at one minute or, at another, a fellow bent on rubbing out a teenage Galante before Galante himself kills for the first time (“Mob guys got some kind of fucked-up ritual where you kill somebody when you turn sixteen?”). Indeed, the characters themselves don’t seem to know themselves, as when said half-tiger finds himself wondering “whether to answer sixteen years ago or in seventy-two years” when asked when he acquired his curious appearance. Not all the pieces hang together, and some are better than others, but the authors do a respectable job overall of tangling with the ineffable.
Is it sci-fi? A viral thriller? Yes and no, and while not for every taste, a pleasure for the experimentally minded.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9056-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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