Cartoony action elements don’t blunt the anger of this bracing SF thriller about slavery.
In a corporate/authoritarian future, a police detective tries to rescue his journalist wife when they are both targeted by a deadly conspiracy to sanction slavery in the United States.
Gurgu opens an SF series based on the potent political premise of a capitalism-yoked, tech-choked Earth of the not-too-distant future embracing slavery as an accepted economic engine. Following eco-collapse, war, and the “Black Crisis” that wrought 80% unemployment, corporations formed their own union to dictate terms most favorable to their survival. In Britain of all places, this notion takes root as institutionalized “servitude.” Whole families with missed debt payments—which encompass almost everyone—can be seized and enslaved. In an America dominated by a monolithic Republican Party, this harsh system is about to be approved under the breathtakingly hypocritical “Freedom Act.” But already, entrepreneurs have broken the law in creating clandestine slave-processing centers (and mass graves). Hard-charging New York City Police Department detective Blake Frye (think Liam Neeson meets Gerard Butler, but tougher) is blissfully married to crusading investigative journalist Amy, whose career derailed when she identified prominent businessman William Wilmot as an underground slave magnate. Wilmot bought her TV network, seeking to dispose of everyone connected to the report. Now, with Amy one of Wilmot’s few surviving enemy-list targets, Frye reluctantly goes to grim, protest-wracked London for a secret rendezvous. It seems even British servitude companies are horrified by the prospect of the lucrative American slave market being monopolized under ruthless Wilmot and want Frye to remove the threat. Upon returning to the “land of the free,” Frye and Amy are imperiled by the corrupt Department of Homeland Customs and Border Security and everyone on Wilmot’s secret payroll. Even with a recursive narrative structure that regularly flashes back to account for how this ordeal came about, the novel keeps the momentum rolling along, and readers will feel chained to what happens next. And lest one wonder how Donald Trump factors into this dystopian vision, Frye ponders that the year 2017 was when everything started going wrong. The author chooses to have Frye afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a trait that supposedly sharpens his deductive skills. But this portrayal also recalls TV’s whimsical, OCD–ridden crime-buster Adrian Monk, a jarring contrast when pyrotechnics and cliffhangers reminiscent of a 007 spectacle break loose.
Cartoony action elements don’t blunt the anger of this bracing SF thriller about slavery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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