Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.
The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer
Promo copy:
The award-winning short fictions in this collection highlight the voice of an inventive contemporary fantasist who has been compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka. In addition to highlights such as “The Situation,” in which a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta ray to be used for educational purposes and “Errata,” which follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world, this volume contains two never-before-published stories. Chimerical and hypnotic, this compilation leads readers through the postmodern into what is emerging into a new literature of the imagination.
One of the leading fantasists of this generation, Jeff VanderMeer’s new collection is a must have for any discerning reader.
Promo copy:
Steve Austin stars as a man with no name, no memory and absolutely nothing left to lose. When he finds himself hunted by both the FBI and the Russian mob, he decides to fight back. And with every beating, bullet and betrayal, he ll remember another piece of the horror that took away his career, his family and his identity. Now the puzzle is nearly complete, and one man is about to take back his past…by ending a whole lot of futures. Erica Cerra and Adam Beach star in this explosive action-thriller about collateral damage, stone cold vengeance, and a double-crossed killing machine known only as THE STRANGER.
Yes, that is pro wrestler Steve Austin. Complete with hologram cover! Really.
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Promo copy:
“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”
First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.
As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.
With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.
More in Part II