A wildly entertaining SF adventure about the life-changing (and world-altering) power of love.
Black’s masterfully constructed SF novel begins as a quirky story about a man dating an extraterrestrial and expands into a grand-scale narrative of alien invasion and intergalactic war.
Dallas web designer Cameron Harrison’s dating experiences after the death of his beloved wife haven’t exactly been promising. Close to giving up on the dating scene entirely, he tries one last (“verging on desperate”) move by joining an online dating site. His first date with Toni Morgan seems to be going well until she offhandedly remarks, “It’s just weird being on another planet.” She informs Harrison that she’s from the planet Cala and that she’s vacationing on Earth in a cloned human body that she calls her “ride” (“‘When one of your people dies, we use the DNA from the body to build,’ she gestured to herself, ‘one of these. We only use people who have chosen to be burned’”). Evidently, Calaians have been coming to Earth for centuries to experience the human condition in all its glory—the impressive range of emotions and the sensory experiences, including the “provocative” sex. Harrison finds himself falling in love with the seductive alien, but on a trip to Rome, the couple is attacked and almost killed. Harrison begins to realize that Morgan’s story about being on vacation is just the beginning of a much more complex personal history: Morgan’s family is prominent on her home world and involved in some sort of contentious social and political upheaval. Her father was murdered because of his beliefs, and now a group of radicals have followed Morgan to Earth and are attempting to kill her as well. Matters become even more complicated when Harrison’s body and mind are essentially upgraded with highly advanced alien tech (“I’m fricking Superman!”) and he discovers that the Calaians aren’t the only visitors on the planet.
Many praiseworthy literary elements power this story—including deep character development, a great initial hook, relentless pacing, and an intricate plot—but it’s the witty narrative voice that makes the novel so readable: “Just two weeks ago I was a nobody web designer, making a decent living doing sites for start-ups. My biggest concern had been where to have dinner. Now, I was up to my ass in an intergalactic political war with alien tech shoehorned into my skull.” Additionally, the utilization of humor—especially when focusing on the language barrier between Harrison and Morgan—is laugh-out-loud funny in places. When Harrison tells Morgan that he thinks she’s hot, she feels her forehead and replies, “I am? I don’t feel warm.” The prose is fluid and clean, making for an undeniable page-turner of a read. Black’s subtle use of imagery makes a simple description memorable: “A silver cocktail dress hugged her athletic body like foil on a chocolate bar.” The thematic resonances are profound, with the fascinating dynamic between a human and an alien connecting on a deeper level exemplifying the values of love (compassion, forgiveness, kindness), regardless of corporeal form.
A wildly entertaining SF adventure about the life-changing (and world-altering) power of love.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780972600712
Page Count: 462
Publisher: Novel Instincts
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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