A pleasing pastiche of ’50s genre and anthology TV.
A small-town musician’s life gets exciting following the appearance of a stranger in this debut SF novella.
New Mexico, 1959. Fender Lee is a “master mechanic, guitar virtuoso and twenty-two year old ex-con” who works at the Last Chance service station in a small desert town. It isn’t as remote as it sounds. In the last year, Fender has waited on Howard Hughes and Johnny Cash, both of whom offered him jobs if he ever ends up leaving the station. But he would prefer not to move on so he can figure out a way to win the heart of Ruby, the waitress at the nearby Bluebird Diner. Then an odd, destructive storm rolls into town and, with it, an unusual visitor: a man from back East called Leon Green, who says he has come to “explore the desert” and “meet some Indians.” Fender soon forms a band with Leon and another friend, playing shows for the adoring teens at the Bluebird and finally gaining the attention of Ruby. Fender is concerned about incurring the wrath of Chigger, his rival for Ruby’s affections. But when Chigger suddenly disappears, it presents Fender with a new mystery to solve. Couey’s prose is neat and leisurely, capturing the rhythms of the small, mid-20th-century desert town: “On Saturday night, the crowd spills out the door. It looks like every teenager for fifty miles around has turned up. There is hardly room for anyone to move much less dance. Fender and Stringbean have a quick consultation then together start putting tables on top of others.” The author explains in her introductory note that the tale is inspired by the episodic television of the ’50s, and she manages to capture that feel exactly. The book’s novella length contributes to the sense of an enclosed story. The narrative is fairly episodic, but it picks up in the second half once the more speculative elements of the plot begin to emerge. Though rather straightforward in some ways, Fender’s tale should please those who share Couey’s nostalgia for an earlier era in American storytelling.
A pleasing pastiche of ’50s genre and anthology TV.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 33
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2023
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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