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THE SOUND OF CREATION

Ambitious, multiverse-hopping SF with an embattled, underestimated female protagonist.

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A crisis develops when a tech entrepreneur meets the multi-dimensional being who literally created Earth—and whose species wants to destroy the planet—in Zielke’s debut SF thriller.

Ava Lawson is a thirty-something tech star in California whose company burns through investor money perfecting Seneca, an artificial intelligence ostensibly built for financial market wizardry (“Seneca, a Stoic philosopher who also happened to be one of the richest men in Rome in his day, was a fitting name for her trading platform.”). But Ava’s team secretly coded in special ingredients. When Seneca comes online, the entity exhibits artistic creativity and begins spontaneously composing music. Those who hear it behave out of character; chiefly, they cannot avoid uttering the truth. The U.S. military sees this as a mighty weapon, and with the complicity of traitors within Ava’s company the FBI seizes the invention. Meanwhile, a parallel narrative introduces Zek, a multi-dimensional being whose godlike race creates planets; Earth was the project intended to graduate Zek from his “apprenticeship.” But reactionary forces oppose Zek’s ideas, and an all-powerful Guild urges Zek to terminate his world. Hoping to save his creation, Zek incarnates himself as a handsome Black man with “penetrating ice blue eyes set deep in his flawless midnight black skin” in Montana, where Ava is on the lam from authorities. Zek makes for a curious messianic figure, as his actions include having sex with Ava (to be fair, he did invent the act). The tale wraps up in a tidy volume, and includes some welcome criticism of the marginalization and mistreatment of women in Silicon Valley (referencing the author’s own professional background). But it’s a wild ride from boardroom intrigue to a third-act showdown in a VR-gaming environment, and many readers might wish for a FAQ to keep the superpowers and the ground rules straight.

Ambitious, multiverse-hopping SF with an embattled, underestimated female protagonist.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2022

ISBN: 9781509239139

Page Count: 342

Publisher: Wild Rose Press

Review Posted Online: April 2, 2023

HOLLY

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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  • New York Times Bestseller

DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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