An SF novel with elaborate worldbuilding, a charismatic lead, and a befuddling plot.
Mendoza’s portal SF/fantasy novel explores themes of identity, betrayal, and corruption.
Mendoza’s story takes place in two parallel dimensions on Earth. In one, humanity is united under the rule of First Consul Gaius Octavius who has depleted the world’s resources and is seeking to create a Gateway to the other dimension to obtain their resources in the hopes of winning a war with an alien species called “Stone Tails.” In the other, Duster Raines, a hard-drinking LA investigator with a dark, military past, is the “Shade” (dimensional twin) to Octavius. Raines is solicited by Madison Andrews to find her husband, who she says was abducted by aliens. He’s hesitant but agrees and acquires a package containing a key to a deposit box. Despite being pursued by FBI agents, SWAT operatives, and robotic canines, he gains access to the box, which contains a green stone ring. He then takes refuge in the apartment of 15-year-old neighbor, Juan, but government operatives soon discover him. An escape attempt leaves him badly injured, and he’s nursed back to health by a mad scientist named Badger. Badger explains the ring can traverse dimensions, and he takes Raines to meet the War Council, a resistance formed against Octavius. When they arrive, they learn that Octavius is creating a Gateway not only to drain more resources from their dimension, but to unite the two realms, become the Eternal Watcher, and gain immense power. Raines agrees to help if they can confirm Juan’s safety, and the team develops a plan: Use Raines’ ring to open a portal to the other dimension and destroy the Gateway. But if they gain access to the alternate dimension, will they have enough firepower to save the multiverse?
Mendoza creates an interesting premise and entertainingly combines elements of SF with detective noir. The pacing, while initially steady, soon falters, however, and action sequences often muddle important plot points. Mendoza depicts a richly detailed world (“The sky above barely showed blue anymore, dominated by those magnificent ebony towers…old skyscraper fronts like you might see back on your own Earth had been repurposed into a marketplace…like some sort of ancient bazaar”) and poses interesting questions, like the nature of identity in a megaverse that contains multiple versions of people. The author also creates impressive depth in the reluctant hero, Raines, by weaving in traumatic dreams of his time in the military. Other cast members, however, don’t enjoy the same intricate portrayal. Juan, for example, is a technological prodigy and adept with alien technologies, all of which is justified only by his explanation: “I play a lot of video games.” Additionally, some aspects of the world remain unclear, such as who gets a dimensional counterpart. Similarly, the dynamic of the connection between Shades is inconsistent. Despite these missteps, the story succeeds in creating a dynamic world with high stakes and plenty of narrative twists.
An SF novel with elaborate worldbuilding, a charismatic lead, and a befuddling plot.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781950301775
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Inkshares
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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