Tense and spooky, with vivid characters that inspire strong feeling; a good new start built on a well-established foundation.
A looming invasion by extradimensional creatures demonstrates just how dangerous it is to forget the lessons of the past.
At the end of The Trials of Empire (2024), Lord Regent Konrad Vonvalt strongly encouraged the Empire of Sova to become a republic, stop fighting wars of conquest, and reject the study of most kinds of magick, especially that which involved contact with other planes of existence. Set 200 years later, this opener of a sequel series to the Empire of the Wolf books argues that getting one out of three is very, very bad. The Republic is an Empire again, a religious schism has led to a fierce war between Sova and the Principality of Casimir in their colonial territories, and worst of all, successfully adhering to the third stricture has left the Sovans without the magickal resources they will soon desperately need. Two monks of a heretical sect report that communication with the afterlife has ceased, portending an ominous event known as the Great Silence. To gain more information about this phenomenon, an ambassadorial mission sets out to negotiate with the mer-men, who still retain their magickal knowledge. At roughly the same time, a nobly born lieutenant with a purchased commission but no real stomach for battle is posted to the frontier, where he must contend with constant screaming from no visible source, bloody hallucinations, and gruesome murders with no obvious perpetrator. And a viciously classist nobleman with an enthusiasm for forbidden magicks investigates a mysterious plague that robs people of their minds, plotting to turn the calamity to his own selfish purposes. Naturally, these plotlines eventually converge. Authors who write follow-ups to trilogies that climax with an apocalypse-averting epic battle generally have difficulty in raising or resetting the stakes convincingly in those new installments. Swan actually succeeds in making his continuation seem organic, as the bittersweet ending to the first trilogy, added to his obvious acknowledgment both of real-life history’s cyclical nature and humanity’s collective tendency to forget the useful lessons of the past, make this reset seem plausible and not a mere retread of what came before. Plus, the eldritch abominations he conjures are genuinely frightening.
Tense and spooky, with vivid characters that inspire strong feeling; a good new start built on a well-established foundation.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780316577007
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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