Trenchant, funny, grotesque, and improbably sweet.
Can the author of a novel in which the moon turned into cheese (When the Moon Hits Your Eye, 2025) go even wackier in a subsequent work? The answer is an explosive yes.
The extensive slashing of federal agencies has cost Mike Boyd his job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, forcing him to return to his hometown and move back in with his semiestranged father and resentful stepmother. But Richland, Ohio, doesn’t seem like a promising place for a fresh start; the town’s major employer, a meat processing plant, is on the verge of being shut down by its corporate overlords despite its profitability. Plus, something bloody strange (in all senses) has started to happen to the animals—and people—experiencing significant stress in Richland. (Exactly what would spoil the story, but it’s also there in the title.) Mike joins forces with Dave Prost, his childhood friend and Richland’s lone police officer, and Andi Sunders, the PR and events coordinator for an upcoming local festival, to uncover what’s really going on in town. This is a fresh and splattery spin on the usual Scalzi formula: a sharp commentary on contemporary sociopolitics and corporate greed. The focus here is the effect those forces have on a small town with one industry, a situation that’s playing out in many places. The perspective is particularly personal this time, as Scalzi himself lives in rural Ohio, in the same county where the story’s fictional town is located. His fiction and nonfiction portray a writer who’s angry about what’s happened to our world and who desperately wants, against all odds, for justice to be served and for people to get what they deserve. His endings are typically a bit too neat, but that’s what his readers come back for. It’s his equivalent of the romance writer’s happily-ever-after, although this book has one of his more unusual flavors of happy ending.
Trenchant, funny, grotesque, and improbably sweet.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780765389039
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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