A gritty, action-packed thriller anchored by a heroic duo worth cheering for.
Manhattan becomes the arena for an epic, drug-tinged battle in Miller’s suspense horror novel.
In 1992, Raven and Keith are former drug addicts who maintain their sobriety with steely resolve. Both have successfully weathered the crack-addled streets of New York for years, but the city has become increasingly brutal. Raven, five years clean and studying law while working with drug treatment placements for street criminals, has begun experiencing vivid nightmares. Upon learning that other Narcotics Anonymous members have been experiencing the same dreams, she panics. Harlem-born former addict Keith meets Raven at the gym and joins forces with her to investigate the source of the dreams and uncover the reason Manhattan has become awash in violence. In a dilapidated building on 117th Street, aggressive drug kingpin “BG” (“Big Guy”) is taking full advantage of the current crack epidemic, pushing an instantly addictive cocaine variant capable of invading dreams. Teenage sex worker Gina, the daughter of junkies, finds herself in over her head after hooking up with one of BG’s henchmen. Coming to her rescue is news reporter Juan Miranda, who’s busy looking into the recent spate of deranged murders and mass shootings. Consistently thrilling and immersive, the novel’s action plays out over the span of several weeks as elements of danger, horror, and drug-fueled violence keep things moving at a frenetic pace. The story also incorporates underlying themes of abuse, addiction, recovery, relapse, and the nuances of sobriety; all are dealt with directly and realistically. The novel’s drug-addicted “zombies,” bedeviled by the “thick, sweet smell of crack,” convincingly occupy Miller’s meticulous, gruesomely detailed, and impeccably drawn setting. Dingy, burnt-out 1990s New York City comes to slimy life, populated by legions of BG’s wild-eyed, ultra-violent, cocaine-fueled “wet-brain” zombies. The author evens the playing field by introducing two seemingly indestructible protagonists to fend off the evil hordes, leaving room for more adventures after an exhilarating, open-ended cliffhanger.
A gritty, action-packed thriller anchored by a heroic duo worth cheering for.Pub Date: today
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: HOW Club Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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