An ultimately hopeful vision of the aftermath of disaster.
A pensive, dystopian Western set in the wake of a devastating pandemic stars a reluctant Buddhist hero with an ability to talk to animals.
In 2048, 52-year-old Will Collins is one of the oldest surviving members of a human society that consists mostly of those 30 and under. Living as a hermit for a year when Disease X struck, he got sick but didn't die. Now the sole caretaker of the Colorado Buddhist community where he has spent decades, he receives a message from California-based scientist Lars, father of his old flame Eva, who, Will has been told, died when the pandemic spread 14 years earlier. Lars instructs him to go to a local veterinarian and get an ampoule, which may contain an antidote, implanted in his body, and then make his way to the Sovereign Republic of California. Will calls together his two best friends, the raven Peau and the cat Casse, and uses a team of mules to pull an old truck across the deserted roads, pursued by the vicious Flynn and his militia. Along the way, he reluctantly assumes custody of bright, mouthy 14-year-old orphan Sophie, who is at risk of being forced into prostitution. Groner is at his best in describing the changed landscape, where passenger pigeons and bison have returned in full force and mutant crocodiles make river crossings dangerous, and the many settlements his little troupe encounters, some welcoming and others very much not. The novel sometimes bogs down in discussions of religion, philosophy, and the history of the series of pandemics that led the world into its present situation, and its final chapters are loaded with unlikely twists. But as long as the narrator is on the road, his exploits and observations provide an engaging window into a strange new world.
An ultimately hopeful vision of the aftermath of disaster.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781954118423
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
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
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