Moderately entertaining at best.
Put Charlie Huston’s The Mystic Art of Erasing All Kinds of Death, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, and the original Alien movie in a blender, water the mix down, and you’ll have this sci-fi thriller.
After her personal and professional lives melt down, talented biochemist Rosalyn Devar leaves Earth for a less-than-glamorous career as a salvager; essentially a janitor cleaning up bodies after traumatic incidents. Her drinking and erratic behavior almost get her fired, but she manages to wangle one last assignment: cleaning up the research ship Brigantine, the latest vessel to mysteriously experience the deaths of all its crew. Or so she thinks until she gets there and discovers that most of the crew is alive but infected by Foxfire, a sentient and weirdly maternal blue fungus that wants Rosalyn to join its hive mind and help “her” take over the rest of humanity. Rosalyn must fight off the ship’s brutal and crazed security detail, Piero, and biochemist, Rayan, both of whom have succumbed to Foxfire, while wondering if she can trust the engineer, Misato, and the charming captain, Edison, who are desperately attempting to resist Foxfire’s influence. Can Rosalyn avoid becoming invaded, get help without endangering anyone else, and find the link between Foxfire and a potential multicorporation conspiracy that might include her own family’s company? The answers aren’t much in doubt, and the conspiracy proves to be not too terribly complicated; either the author (Tomb of Ancients, 2019) trusts readers to fill in the details or just couldn’t be bothered to take on the job herself. And it’s odd that Rosalyn, a former biochemist with a specialty in xenobiology, offers no real scientific speculations about Foxfire, leaving that to other characters; she does eventually come up with a way of combating the thing, but there’s no explanation of how she developed it, suggesting that the author didn't do much mushroom research of her own, either. Rosalyn is much more interesting as a troubled janitor than she is as a thriller heroine, and the tenuous attraction between her and Edison seems contrived. A story about her cleanup work could’ve been interesting, but the book heads toward the formulaic territory of alien threats and corrupt corporate shenanigans far too quickly.
Moderately entertaining at best.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49183-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
