The first book by Michael Koryta that I read was his supernatural thriller The Ridge, in which a local cop and reporter attempt to unravel the mysterious happenings in their Midwestern town. A former private investigator and journalist, Koryta is a writer who does suspense and mystery very well, whether the situation is more out of the ordinary or set within the daily goings-on of regular, everyday life. His latest book, Those Who Wish Me Dead, is an exercise in sheer suspense set against a familiar backdrop of man vs. man vs. nature. Like Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes, the characters resemble typical stock characters from literary thrillers, but have nifty little tweaks that make them feel human and believable.
The novel revolves around an unfortunate teenager named Jace Wilson, who, while taking an ill-advised swim in a quarry on a dare, spots two hitmen in the process of dumping bodies into the very lake he is swimming in. Flash forward a few months to when Ethan Serbin, a wilderness survival instructor who works with at-risk teenagers, takes a group into the Beartooth Mountains for the summer expedition with Jace among them. He’s been placed with this group in an effort to completely remove him from anything that might give up his location to the two hitmen, a creepy pair of brothers known as the Blackwells who find his general location all too quickly. They start a forest fire, after which the chase begins, and of course, not everyone makes it out alive.
All in all, this wasn’t one of Koryta’s best books, but it’s an entertaining thriller nonetheless. The characters are believable, their backstories are solid and compelling, and the added tension of the forest fire makes the book all the more suspenseful. It pretty much grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go until the end, and the nice part about it was that even with the looming threat of the psychopathic Blackwell brothers, there were still twists aplenty that I didn’t really see coming. It’s a good book for a stormy weekend night.
One can’t help but be in awe of the sheer body of work that Stephen King has accumulated during the forty-odd years he’s been writing novels and short stories. Said body of work has netted him several awards, including the Distinguished Medal for Contributions to American Letters and, more recently, a Bram Stoker award for best novel for Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining (which was amazing, by the way). It has also inspired countless writers through works of imagination and sheer terror that aren’t limited to one particular genre – he’s written horror, dark fantasy, science-fiction, drama, and sometimes a mixture of all in a single potent pot. With Mr. Mercedes, King has added “hard-boiled detective novel” to the list of genres that he’s tried his hand at, and while I wish the novel’s antagonist had a bit more nuance to him, King has succeeded in bringing his unique brand of human, foibles-and-all character drama to the aforementioned style of writing.
The novel begins with an act of terrorism. A group of people lining up outside of a job center are brutally murdered by a man who plows a stolen Mercedes into them while they are waiting to hunt for employment. Some time afterward, retired police detective Bill Hodges, one of the lead detectives on the case before he left the force, receives a gloating note from the killer. It brings him back to life in a way, and leads him to conduct his own investigation without the knowledge of his former partner. Meanwhile, Brady Hartsfield, the killer in the Mercedes (don’t worry – this isn’t a spoiler. He is identified on the front flap of the book jacket and throughout the book), is planning something even more horrific than his act with the car, something that Hodges, with the help of a mismatched, tech-savvy pair, must stop in the proverbial race against time.
Overall, the novel is vintage King, with fully realized, very human characters doing the best they can against a seemingly unstoppable foe in a briskly paced thriller. His background in horror is also on full display here, sinking readers into the dark and disturbed cracks and crevices of Brady Hartsfield’s mind. That being said, if there is one qualm I have about the book, it’s the feeling that Hartsfield’s character suffers from a minor lack of nuance. Hodges, of course, is the retired detective who is more old school than his counterparts, but I felt as though there was more to him and his outlook than a typically gruff, lone-wolf detective.
Hartsfield, on the other hand, is an antagonist who is racist, sexist, homophobic, narcissistic and sociopathic. These kinds of traits in antagonists is, of course, nothing new, and King is far from the first writer to employ these characteristics in a novel’s antagonist. But the more I see them in a novel’s singular or collective bad guys, the more it feels like a cheap fallback in order to make it clear who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy. Some of the scariest antagonists in literature, like Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, had plenty of the latter two characteristics, but were made interesting and compelling through the ways in which those characteristics shaped their outlook and their reasons for pursuing the protagonists. They were, of course, disturbing, yet bone-chilllingly interesting in that the stakes were raised as the protagonist struggles to survive their onslaught.
I, of course, am not trying to suggest that racism, sexism, or homophobia are good qualities to have. They most certainly are not. But I wish that King’s antagonist in Mr. Mercedes, while still a pretty scary guy, had a bit more nuance to him the aforementioned characteristics. In any case, fans of Stephen King will greatly enjoy his latest book, which will whet their appetites before his next novel, Revival, debuts in November.
It goes without saying that religion and faith in either one or multiple gods (or different incarnations of the same god, depending on the faith you’re talking about) is and always has been a contentious and sometimes perilous issue. On the one hand, religious faith has inspired many to do good within their communities, helping other people and leading fulfilling, healthy lives. The flip side of that coin has led to wars, atrocities, and genocide in the name of eradicating those who do not subscribe to the religious doctrine of a particular country. It is truly frightening how religious faith can be twisted into a potent weapon that attracts followers and influences them to do the bidding of the wielder of that faith, be it a con man or even worse, a true believer.
Sarah Lotz perfectly captures that sense of dread and disquiet in her book The Three, a novel that follows the aftermath of an event in the near future called Black Thursday. During this event, four planes simultaneously crash in distant parts of the world, alarming many who reasonably wonder if another terrorist organization has managed to perpetrate another 9/11. Terrorism is eventually ruled out, although the most perplexing thing about Black Thursday is the survival of three children, one from three crash sites, who come out on the other side with almost no injuries. The miraculous nature of their survival leads to the development of a movement led by an American pastor, who believes that these children are signs of the coming apocalypse. The thing is, despite the insanity that this movement generates, there is a very disquieting possibility that he may be correct, and not in the way he imagines.
Lotz’s novel is structured as a book within a book, in which an investigative reporter, Elspeth Martins, has collected oral accounts of Black Thursday and the subsequent fallout involving the three children and those that surround them. Her choice of narrative technique is a wise one, as it brings the reader more fully into the story and allows for the full range of human emotions from the subjects being interviewed, as well as other accounts such as news, online messaging, and letters. Lotz does a masterful job of creating a compelling narrative from these oral accounts, and the scariest part of her story is the creeping insidiousness with which the aforementioned movement gains steam, and the ways in which the children may very well be the harbingers of a coming cataclysm.
In short, I highly recommend The Three to anyone who is interested in darkly suspenseful fiction, good characterization, and simply all-around good storytelling.
Within the past few years, video games have seen a remarkable evolution in terms of its nature as a medium of expression. Milestones such as the BioShock franchise and The Last of Us have changed the way people looked at video games, and have subsequently changed the approach of developers who want to advance the medium. Machinegames, a Swedish development company, has tried to use this approach with Wolfenstein: The New Order, the highly anticipated new entry into the popular Wolfenstein franchise. The storytelling seen here is superb, with believable characters and a fully realized world through which the story plays out, but the storytelling and the highly kinetic shootouts through which you blast your way using one gun or two don’t really mix all the time, and the moments involving small fetch quests really bring down the game as a whole.
The game puts you in the boots of William “B.J.” Blazkowicz (I think I spelled that right…right?), an American soldier who is still on the front lines of World War II in 1946. Yep, this is an alternate timeline in which the Nazis acquired technology based on a mysterious power source, allowing them to jump miles ahead of Allied technology and win the Second World War. Blazkowicz ends up in a vegetative state following a mission to a Nazi stronghold, and for 14 years, he sits in a Polish insane asylum, witnessing the goings-on around him until he comes back to Nazi-killing life following the “purge” of the asylum’s staff and patients.
He discovers that the year is 1960, and the Nazis now reign across the planet. The U.S. has surrendered following the nuclear bombing of New York City, and small pockets of resistance exist across the world, fighting against the expanding Nazi regime. Blazkowicz and Anya Oliwa, the nurse who took care of him in the asylum, eventually meet up with resistance fighters with a home base in Berlin, where they spend the game being flies in the ointment of the Nazi war machine.
Overall, Wolfenstein: The New Order is not a bad game, but it’s not great. As I mentioned earlier, Machinegames deserves a lot of kudos for their storytelling, which makes for fully realized, fleshed-out characters as well as the realistic consequences of a world dominated by Nazi Germany. It’s the first World War II-based game I’ve played in which the horrors of a concentration camp are on full display, ranging from filthy, fly-infested barracks to cremation areas for dead prisoners. Something else that has received a great deal of praise from other reviewers is the game’s depiction of sexuality. Rather than mold it into a tasteless display of eye candy as many venues of entertainment are wont to do, it is shown as a loving connection between two people.
That being said, Wolfenstein: The New Order suffers from mismatched gameplay on occasion. The kind of story that Machinegames is trying to tell – that is, a more introspective, character-driven drama of people trying to survive in this hellish, Nazi-dominated world – doesn’t really fit with the run-and-gun gameplay, which employs dual-wielding and a health meter that regenerates to the closest multiple of 20. It’s old-school shooter gameplay that also includes having to pick up ammo, weapons, and health through the touch of a button rather than simply walking over it and collecting it. Many others have had a problem with this sort of throwback to old-school shooters, but I liked it. It made me more aware of my surroundings and what I needed in order to get through the level in one piece.
Wolfenstein: The New Order ultimately tries marry gameplay and storytelling, but it doesn’t quite get to where it aspires to go. This doesn’t make it a bad game, but it does make me hope that Machinegames will improve upon this formula in future games.
Ah, the post-apocalypse. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the influence of post-apocalyptic stories is ubiquitous in our present-day culture, and writers, game designers, and screenwriters continue to come up with compelling new twists on life after the collapse of civilization following nuclear war, viral outbreaks, etc. Josh Malerman, the lead singer in a Michigan rock band known as High Strung, tries something different with his debut novel, Bird Box, in which the world goes to hell in a hand basket as a result of something that has been moving around the globe, causing all those who see it to become violently insane (including animals). To combat this threat, survivors nail blankets and boards across windows and shield their eyes with blindfolds, their hands, or just simply closing their eyes as they pick their way through the empty streets and houses. It’s an interesting premise, trying to cope with something that drives you insane if you take even a single glance at it, but there are parts of the book where the reader’s requirement to suspend their disbelief comes under a lot of strain.
First, the story. The protagonist is Malorie, a young woman who cares for two children (whom she has, for some reason, named only “Boy” and “Girl”) through a mixture of love and harsh action intended to keep them alive. She and the two children are the only survivors of a group of people with whom she took shelter in the days following the appearance of whatever caused this apocalypse. When we meet her, Malorie makes the fateful decision to blindfold herself and the children and to undertake a harrowing journey up a nearby river to a place of refuge. On the way, she reminisces on the early days of the collapse, her experiences with her fellow survivors, and encounters with those driven mad by whatever is outside.
While the book is well-written, it suffers from a jagged pace. The chapters jar the reader from past to future to past again, like a highly unstable episode of Lost, and the use of the river as the characters’ pathway is problematic. Every path in a story is laden with obstacles that the characters have to overcome, but in the case of this story, you have three blindfolded people in a boat on a river, and the only way to really generate those obstacles is if they were to accidentally hit a bank, get snagged on something, or run into someone else on the water. While these things do occur, they strain believability because of what happens during these instances.
The encounter with an insane man on a boat, for example, started out as being entirely plausible. It is scary and fraught with tension, especially since the man in the boat is edging closer to the protagonists’ and yelling for them to take their blindfolds off. He gets close enough to their boat and then threatens to remove their blindfolds for them, and then…doesn’t. After Malorie screams at him to leave, he actually does leave, which made no sense to me. If Malorie somehow knocked him off the boat and started rowing like hell, that would have been more believable than the man simply taking off in his boat when there would have been nothing to stop him from doing what he was threatening to do. What amazes me is that this happens not once, but twice, throughout the course of the book. Needless to say, this does not do the book any favors in the believability department.
This is a shame, because the characters are well-realized, the threat to their lives is frightening, and overall, Malerman’s use of language and writing techniques is superb. Bird Box is by no means a bad book, but I hope that in his future literary endeavors, Josh Malerman makes his work more believable.
Alien is one of my all-time favorite movies. Its sequel, Aliens, is fantastic, too, due to its way of taking the tension from the first film and exploding it on the silver screen through the introduction of Marines, pulse rifles, and hordes of aliens looking to either puncture their skulls, or remove them for the purpose of placing them in front of one of those nasty-looking eggs with an equally nasty surprise inside.
But the thing I always liked about the first film, and why it will always remain nearer and dearer to my horror-loving heart than its loud and vociferous sibling, is the way in which it depicts ordinary people faced with a seemingly invincible, powerful foe that could be hiding anywhere on their ship. They’re not soldiers. They’re not police. There are no military or paramilitary backgrounds. They are working class average joes who are sick and tired of being cooped up with each other in the middle of space, which is why they are none too happy when their ship is diverted to a certain planet by their corporation.
Unsurprisingly, Aliens has served as the inspiration for several shooters, namely the Aliens Vs. Predator series (which was awesome until it made the jump to consoles) and the reviled Aliens: Colonial Marines, which I downloaded from Steam for $4.99 and immediately uninstalled after roughly an hour of dealing with its boring level design and hopelessly stupid AI. This is why I became very, very excited when I heard that Sega and Creative Assembly, the developer best known for the Total War series of strategy games, were creating a survival horror game based on the first film of the franchise.
Here’s the premise (some movie spoilers if you haven’t seen the original film): Alien: Isolation is set 15 years after the events of the first film, in which Ellen Ripley has successfully blasted the alien out into space after it hid aboard the ship she used to make her getaway from the Nostromo. It focuses on her daughter, Amanda, who works for the same corporation and is seeking answers behind the disappearance of her mother. She sets out for a space station known as Sevastopol after learning that the flight recorder from the Nostromo has been recovered, and upon arriving, discovers that the space station is damaged for reasons yet to be made clear, the crew is terrified and trying to survive, and that the station is now being stalked by a similar creature as the one that made it aboard the Nostromo 15 years earlier.
Here’s what I like about the game. Like the original film, it focuses on a group of engineers and scientists working for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Again, not soldiers or former police officers and the like. It’s from a first-person perspective, and you have no weapons with which to defend yourself. It’s been indicated in gameplay breakdowns and developer diaries released by the team at Creative Assembly that you will be able to pick up supplies and items that you can use to craft distractions and/or traps for the alien so you can get away. Other than that (and hopefully the flamethrower from the original film), you are defenseless, and have to rely on your wits, your senses, and the bulky CRT motion detector that you will be carrying around with you in order to keep from being discovered and killed by the single xenomorph stalking the halls of the station.
The depiction of the alien in this game is another aspect of the game that I’m excited about. Further developer diaries from Creative Assembly indicate that the AI that drives the alien is completely unscripted, which means that it’s unpredictable and can show up at any point in the game. If it works the way I’m hoping it will, this will mean tons of replay value, since encounters with the alien can potentially last up to half an hour or more. While I love games like Resident Evil and Dead Space, I played them so many times that the scripted encounters with the monsters became less scary since I knew what was coming. With Alien: Isolation, that hopefully won’t be case.
I also love the world that Creative Assembly has created in the game. If there was anything that the game BioShock accomplished, it was underscore the importance of a living, breathing, vibrant world that carried its own ecology and economy that its NPC denizens adhered to. In Alien: Isolation, they have gone out of their way to adhere to the original vision of the 1979 film – that is, no flat screens or the sort of technology we are used to today. Creative Assembly effectively replicated the bulky, CRT technology and aesthetics seen in the original film. This is something that I wish had been done in Prometheus, which, despite its producers’ assurances to the contrary, was a prequel to Alien, included futuristic technology such as holograms and the like. I’m glad that Creative Assembly has ignored the technology we are used to and have instead focused on a retro futuristic feel that replicates the set pieces for the original film.
Now…here are some of my worries, now that I’ve blathered on regarding what I’m excited about.
There are two causes for concern – the kind of interaction you will have with the other NPCs populating the station, and how well sneaking through darkened corridors of a derelict space station is going to translate into a 10-15 hour experience. The latter is something that others have expressed concern about as well, and what I’m hoping is that the encounters with NPCs between the bouts of sneaking will be just as meaningful as the undoubtedly terrifying encounters players will have with the alien. It has been indicated that the other NPCs on the station will not have the protagonist’s best interests at heart, since they are terrified and trying to stay alive on their own terms. There’s a potential here for a dynamic regarding who you can count as your allies and as your enemies, especially since, with regard to the latter category, there is a rival corporation other than Weyland-Yutani in play here. What they have to do with this present situation is unclear at this point, but it’s entirely possible that we’re going to have rival corporations fighting over who gets to control the alien and attempt to exploit it for their nefarious purposes.
In any case, we will find out on October 7th of this year, which is when Alien: Isolation debuts. I, for one, have high hopes for this game, since it so effectively replicates the original film while standing on its own two feet in terms of a unique storyline and gameplay reflecting games such as Amnesia or Outlast. I just hope that the storyline and the encounters with the other people on the station will be just as meaningful as the encounters with the alien.
For further info, here’s some links to the aforementioned developer diaries and gameplay breakdowns.
After finishing Fiend, I can honestly say that it is one of the few books I’ve read that has made me want to take a shower immediately afterward.
Having said that, I want to make it clear that this is not a criticism. It’s a testament to the strong writing ability of Peter Stenson, whose debut novel is nothing short of a horror tour-de-force that is equal parts Requiem for a Dream and Dawn of the Dead. Fiend tells the tale of Chase Daniels, a drug addict who comes out of a days-long meth bender to discover that the world has been overtaken by a zombie apocalypse. Over the course of the novel, Chase, his friend “Typewriter,” and an assortment of other meth-addicted characters move from place to place in and around the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, their survival and battles with the walking dead determined by one thing: their incessant need for meth and the paraphernalia needed to make it.
Much like Ania Ahlborn’s The Bird Eater was one of the scariest haunted house novels I’d ever read, Fiend is one of the scariest zombie novels to have entered my reading radar, and is heartbreaking to boot. Stenson’s descriptions of the zombies are viscerally frightening and disturbing, considering their nakedness and the way they giggle before they start tearing into you. Fiend doesn’t scrimp on the use of zombies for allegory, either. Like Robert Kirkman’s characters in The Walking Dead, Stenson’s protagonists are much like the undead themselves, surviving but not really living, either, since their existence relies on the quantity of meth they have at their disposal as well as the amount of ammunition necessary to obtain it.
That being said, the descriptions of meth addiction and what it does to people are a large part of the emotional core of the novel. Stenson himself was a meth addict at one point (my hat is off to you, Mr. Stenson, for ten years’ sobriety, and I hope the rest of your years see you and yours in good health and life), and the hallucinatory nature of his narrative provides not only an explanation for why Chase and his friends weren’t all that aware of the world going to hell around them at first, but also explains their motivations for what they do. They aren’t all that concerned about bathing, eating, or sustaining themselves through means other than the meth. The meth is all they care about – everything else is secondary, as evidenced by the multiple lists that Chase makes in the book for what he and his friends need to survive. Their clothes are dirty, their bodies are malnourished and skinny, and the places where they shelter are filled with trash, grime, and dirt. It’s an existence that is made all the more hellish by the presence of the giggling hordes of zombies shambling around outside, waiting for victims to make themselves known.
While I could have done without the multitude of sexual allegories, a lot of which seemed unnecessary, Fiend is a book that zombie fans will snap up greedily, and will also provide thoughtful insights into drug addiction and the effect that it has on the addicted. Peter Stenson’s future novels will certainly be on my reading list in the years to come.
Thought-provoking horror is the kind I like best. It’s the kind of horror that drills its way into your mind and makes a home for itself deep within the darkest recesses of your consciousness, making you think about those afflicted by it and how, in one way or another, it is going to continue to cycle itself across the ages and result in either the deaths or the irrevocable psychological damage of the people it touches. When this kind of horror is done wrong, you get slasher flick clones and film franchises that run themselves into the ground after introducing a bold, novel approach. When it is done right, you get novels like Ania Ahlborn’s fourth outing, The Bird Eater, a standalone novel in which the evil she introduces will recycle itself across the ages, perpetuating its pitch-black existence in a road to hell for those it afflicts. How it is created and how it passes itself along is all part of the deliciously creepy fun of diving into the book, which I highly recommend you do.
The Bird Eater follows one Aaron Holbrook, a young man reeling from loss and a broken marriage. He returns to his hometown of Ironwood, Arkansas, with the intent of restoring his aunt’s old house, a dark, imposing structure in the woods that has spawned its share of local legends. Holbrook is one such legend, since he was taken from Ironwood following the death of his guardian, the aforementioned aunt. As is the case with any horror novel revolving around a protagonist’s homecoming, Aaron’s arrival stirs a hornet’s nest, both among his former friends in the town and in the supernatural force in the house, which has trained its malevolent gaze on Aaron’s fragile, broken psyche.
The Bird Eater is, without a doubt, one of the scariest haunted house novels I’ve ever read. It is most definitely up there alongside Shirley Jackson’s magisterial The Haunting of Hill House, especially since Aaron’s psychological fragility reminded me of Eleanor Vance and the way the evil forces at work in Hill House gradually wore her down to a nub over the course of the novel. Ahlborn does a remarkable job of using subtlety and verisimilitude to establish a sense of creeping dread and tension that lies underneath the summertime rural country in which the story takes place.
What especially sets this novel apart from other haunted house-related works is the way in which Ahlborn evokes the tragedy of empty, forlorn spaces in the daytime, and the way in which those spaces assume entirely different forms when night falls, filling them with the blackness of things seen and unseen. The best example aside from the house is the Ironwood High School, abandoned, gutted, and lying in ruin by the time Aaron returns. The high school, like the house, is symbolic of today’s isolated, small-town America, where there are barely any jobs to support the local inhabitants and the ruin of once-productive steel or lumber mills dot the landscape.
The only major qualms I had with the book was the way in which some characters are introduced, but then find no meaningful resolution by the end of the novel. An example is Hazel, a waitress at a local diner in Ironwood who is introduced, drops out of sight for a bit, and then reappears later on, serving no real purpose in the overall arc of the plot. The changes in perspective were also a little jagged here and there, especially when significant portions of the book focus on Aaron and then suddenly shift to other characters.
Other than these slight stumbling points, The Bird Eater works marvelously well. It is a sublime piece of horror fiction and belongs on the reading lists and shelves of every horror enthusiast. I will definitely be looking forward to anything Ania Ahlborn offers in the coming years.
I’m usually not one to pick up straight literary fiction or drama. Aside from Richard Russo (Empire Falls, which is one of my favorite books) or Wally Lamb (I Know This Much is True is another favorite), I tend to drift towards the crime, thriller, horror, sci-fi, or fantasy sections of the bookstore or the library. That being said, Wiley Cash, a writer of literary thrillers in the vein of Cormac McCarthy and Flanney O’Connor, is a new addition to my list of authors that I’ll check out when a new book of theirs shows up.
This Dark Road to Mercy is Cash’s sophomore effort, and you can tell he’s improved since his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home. Like his first effort, Cash’s book is split between multiple first-person perspectives, which is an interesting way of telling a story, but is in danger of bogging down when the reader has to readjust to different world-views every few chapters. That was the main qualm that I had with A Land More Kind Than Home – the story become difficult to follow with three main protagonists with different motivations and worldviews to adjust to.
This Dark Road to Mercy does a much better job with this. The protagonists in question here are Easter Quillby, a young girl with a little sister, Ruby, to care for, Brady Weller, their legal guardian in foster care, and Robert Pruitt, a former baseball player with a score to settle with Easter’s father, Wade. Their father shows up to see them and eventually removes them from their foster home, taking them in a cross-country journey with Pruitt in hot pursuit of the stolen money Wade carries with him.
Cash’s second book is a good read for anyone interested in the works of authors such as Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O’Connor.
The post-apocalyptic world is all the rage these days. Between games like The Last of Us and TV shows like The Walking Dead, the varied stories of people caught in extraordinary, terrifying times have captured our attention by presenting tales of said people trying to hold on to the shreds of their humanity when there are no laws to protect them against other survivors or the monsters roaming the land, depending on the kind of world being depicted.
Ben Winters’ novel The Last Policeman, the first in a trilogy, marks a vastly different approach to this genre because it is a pre-apocalyptic novel, focusing on a world that is slowly spiraling downward towards an eventual end brought about by an asteroid collision with Earth. People either seek to fulfill all the items on their individual bucket lists, make peace with themselves or the others they’ve hurt, take up lives of crime, or sink into wells of drug- or alcohol-fueled apathy. The government has nationalized state National Guard units, who attempt to keep the peace.
Amidst all of this is Hank Palace, a recently promoted detective working out of the special investigations unit of the police department in Concord, New Hampshire. At the novel’s beginning, Palace is called to the scene of a suicide discovered in the bathroom of a local McDonald’s. He takes the investigation further than what his fellow detectives and district attorney would like, going over the scene and realizing that the details aren’t adding up to suicide, but to murder.
What follows is Palace’s journey into a case that only he believes is a murder, with the chief of his unit indulging him and everyone else not really caring. The thing that’s great about Winters’ novel is the believability of his protagonist – world-weary at a young age, trying to do an increasingly Sisyphus-like job what with the lack of motivation and the danger that increases the deeper he gets into the case.
My only qualm is that the book plateaus a little towards the middle. While the vast majority of the book makes for very good pre-apocalyptic noir, there are moments that feel more like filler rather than adding to the overall depth of the novel. In any case, fans of noir and apocalyptic scenarios won’t be disappointed in this novel. I’m eager to get into the rest of the trilogy myself after reading this first book.
The Eclectic Post-Dispatch 