Big-hearted, generous, and beautifully written.
An unlikely group of travelers take a tour of glitches in the simulation that is the world.
JP Laurent has seen better days. The retired engineer is reeling from the death of his wife and a battle with brain cancer that caused him to take early retirement. His longtime best friend, Dulin Marks, a comic-book writer, has decided to sign himself and JP up for a tour to see the “Impossibles”: a series of “glitches, anomalies, Areas of Scientific What-the-Fuckery” that popped up seven years ago following the discovery that the world was actually a simulation, an announcement that caused the planet to descend into chaos. JP and Dulin are joined on the tour by a Canterbury Tales–esque group of pilgrims, including a rabbi, two nuns, a pregnant teenage influencer, and the conspiracy-minded host of a podcast with the motto “Speaking Truth to Morons.” There’s also a late addition to the tour: Gillian, a professor on the run from a murderous group of “incels in long leather coats and hair gel, who believed they were among the 1 percent of people who were actually conscious.” JP and Dulin help Gillian dodge her would-be killers, even as the influencer, who takes a near-instant dislike to the professor, tries to dox her. Gregory’s novel is far from an SF retread of The Bucket List; while the friendship between JP and Dulin is depicted sweetly (and with abundant humor), this book is something much greater: an epic adventure and an examination of how humans (or their simulacra) interact when everybody is at their worst. It’s a testament to Gregory’s skill at character development that the people in this novel, and not the bizarre phenomena they’re observing, are the most fascinating part. This is a marvel.
Big-hearted, generous, and beautifully written.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781668060049
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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