A vision quest–like eco-fantasy musing on the anguished conditions of modern Earth.
Earth is on the verge of being judged unworthy and devoured by alien entities in Tembruell’s SF thriller, the first in a series.
In a hell-world in the center of outer-space’s Dark Matter realm abide the Inani, batlike humanoids who inspired the infamous real-life West Virginia cryptid “Mothman.” They devour unpromising or nonessential planets to sustain themselves; Earth is on the menu, doomed by its detrimental, self-destructive apex species, the greedy and violent Homo sapiens. Earth actually had potential, as evidenced by the nature-centered culture and cosmology of North America’s Indigenous peoples, but they were extirpated by European invaders who were armed with bigotry, firepower, and religious fervor. Present-day humanity (manipulated by secret agents of Chaos) suffers under climate change and political discord. In midst of natural disasters and fascist militias, the state of Texas secedes to be become the brutal Lone Star Nation. (However, it still contains champions and “elementals” on Earth Mother’s side.) Arden McBride is a traumatized veteran of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. Now a born-again “Druid,” he serves as mystic protector of a handful of nature-loving Austin-based pagans running from conservative gun-nut death squads. Other heroes include Komkom “Kwin” Akwini, a talking tree (the mighty Kwin?), and STEM, an elemental spirit who became entangled in a new manmade “innerverse” (the internet) and struggles to comprehend a Donald Trump-era miasma of digital disinformation and hostility. But what of the Mothman? See next installment. This book is very much a stage-setting opener, drawing from the same author-illustrator’s earlier linked short-story compendium, Stories, Legends and Truths From the Blighted Earth (2023). A veritable cornucopia of anthropological musings and introspection accompanies the slight storyline, which is rich in abstruse language and word invention (“Chaos’s En’Troop-EE had invaded the Web with an ingeniously conceived and well-executed insurgency of hate, infiltrating all exchanged processes”) and short on positive things to say about Western civilization. Timely references to 21st-century pathologies distinguish the story from artifacts of the literary era when Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan did or didn’t walk the Earth.
A vision quest–like eco-fantasy musing on the anguished conditions of modern Earth.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798891323599
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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