A compelling SF survival saga in which humans turn out to be the prime threat.
Human space colonization is disrupted by bizarre invaders and forces from an outside dimension in Gillespie’s SF novel.
This second volume in the author’s Riders of the Stars universe is a grim adventure set in the same dysfunctional star system as the opening installment’s Atom Bomb Baby (2023). Serenity Orbital is the ironically named vast space-station array circling the colonized planet Arcadia in a future in which humans—thanks to technological gifts from aliens—have spread throughout the galaxy. The Kraal, tentacled, incomprehensible horrors apparently from another dimension, have launched a devastating attack; attempts to repel them with nuclear weapons has only made things worse, creating "void storms" that emit mutant creatures. Luckless human victims of the invaders become living-dead “growlers,” mindless and hostile decaying things. Diego Alvarez is an adolescent boy among the survivors subsisting on a now-isolated Serenity Orbital, a remnant of civilization that has degraded into a religious dictatorship. Because Diego suffers growler-like facial scars and possesses paranormal powers, he is much bullied and feared. After Diego’s parents are killed in a Kraal attack, corrupt prophet Carlos exiles the boy to the dreaded lower-deck rings, which are overrun with growlers and other void mutants. Diego survives on his own for a year before he gets some human company—kids he knew from Serenity who have been forced into the terror zones by Carlos as a “rite of passage.” One need not be familiar with Atom Bomb Baby to appreciate this story, which owes much to William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies (1954) as jealousy, treachery, and toxic machismo subvert the banished youths’ would-be brotherhood. Readers of zombie fiction will dig the ghoulish growlers, who shamble through a George Romero-like consumerist environment of defunct retail spaces and are not undeserving of some sympathy. Not much is learned about the Kraal, but followers of Japanese anime will recognize the trope of enigmatic alien hostiles who pop out of nowhere at the convenience of the plot.
A compelling SF survival saga in which humans turn out to be the prime threat.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780998749969
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Revenant Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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