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Red Moon: A Novel
Author:
Percy, Benjamin
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: PS3616
Print Run: 100000
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ISBN-13: 9781455501663
LCCN: 2012016127
Imprint: Grand Central Publishing
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Pub Date: 05/07/2013
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $25.99
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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533 p. ; 24 cm.
H 9.5",
W 6.5",
D 1.75",
1.96 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Fiction Core Collection, 17th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 18th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 19th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 20th ed.
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Awards:
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Booklist Starred Reviews
Library Journal Starred Reviews
Publishers Weekly Annual Best Books Selections
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Starred Reviews:
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Booklist
Library Journal
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TIPS Subjects:
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Western Fiction
Horror
Occult Fiction
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Thrillers / Political
FICTION / Fantasy / Paranormal
FICTION / Literary
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LC Subjects:
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Horror fiction
Werewolves, Fiction
Western stories
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SEARS Subjects: |
Horror fiction
Werewolves, Fiction
Western stories
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 01/01/2013 |
| There is a menace among them, and the one man who can help may be turning into the very thing he's hunting. Claire Forrester's parents were killed by the government agents who broke in; Patrick Gamble is the sole survivor of a plane crash that's now named him a hero. As the night of the red moon approaches, Chase Williams vows to keep United States citizens safe from the strange world waiting at the door. 544pp., 100K, Tour |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Booklist | 04/01/2013 |
| Doing for werewolves what Justin Cronin's The Passage (2010) did for vampires, this literary horror novel is set in an alternate version of the present day. Everything is pretty much the same, except for one teensy difference: werewolves--or lycans, as Percy calls them--aren't the stuff of mythology. They're real, and they've existed for centuries: ordinary men and women afflicted with an unusual (and seemingly incurable) disease, lobos, which turns them into another sort of life-form altogether. Lycans and humans have established an uneasy peace, but, as the book opens, lycan terrorists seem determined to spark a bloody war. Percy focuses on a trio of engaging and beautifully drawn characters: Patrick, a boy who survives one of the terrorist attacks; Claire, a girl whose family is murdered for reasons she doesn't clearly understand; and Chase, a governor whose aggressively anti-lycan views are challenged in a tragically ironic way. Parallels to the U.S. in the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks are clear and deliberate, but it's the way the author, following in the footsteps of such writers as Glen Duncan (in The Last Werewolf, 2011), humanizes the werewolf, turning him from snarling beast into a creature for whom we feel compassion and affection, that makes the book such a splendid read. Although the novel tells a self-contained story, there is plenty of room for a sequel, which would be most welcome. Pitt, David. 544p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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| Library Journal | 03/01/2013 |
| Fans of Max Brooks's zombies (World War Z) and Justin Cronin's vampires (The Passage) will enjoy the dramatic breadth of Percy's (The Wilding) tale of werewolves, here called lycans. A prion is the cause of the infection that leads to lycanthropy, and Percy includes public health and minority rights in his depiction of a society that has been trying to deal with the infected for centuries. A lycan rights group launches a terrorist attack on an airliner that shocks the nation, and the main characters deal with the aftereffects. Claire is a lycan who lives an uneventful suburban life with her parents when a post-attack government raid sends her on the run. The lone passenger who survived the attack is Patrick, whose father's National Guard unit has just shipped out as part of the U.S. peacekeeping mission in the werewolf homeland (which happens to be rich in uranium). As the lives of these two young people connect, questions about what it means to be human and how and whether modern society can survive are asked and answered. VERDICT This literary thriller by an award-winning young writer will excite fans of modern horror who enjoy a large canvas and a history to go with their bloody action. Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green. 530p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 05/01/2013 |
| When you talk of talented writers under 40, Benjamin Percy is a name that must come up. A list of his awards--mostly for visceral short stories that are as elegant and lilting as Irish ballads yet possess a raw violence beneath--would take up more space than this review allows. His second novel is Red Moon, a fat, multilayered page-turner that has fans of Percy and lycanthropy alike gnashing their teeth in anticipation. Yes, it's about werewolves, but it is also about coming of age, young love, racism, xenophobia, warfare's moral complexities and the zeitgeist of 21st-century America. In other words, Percy went big. In Red Moon's alternative world, humans and werewolves--they prefer to be called Lycans, thank you--have coexisted forever. Living worldwide, but with a sovereign Lycan state--in the manner of Israel--Lycans are required by law to take Lupex to keep from changing with the full moon. The Lycan Republic is policed by American armed forces, which are increasingly looked upon as occupiers. American patrols are often targeted by insurgents, from full-on attacks to IEDs. Sound familiar? In Percy's alternative world, the decades-long peace between humans and werewolves has been broken. When Lycan terrorists target American airliners, the innocent and guilty alike are rounded up, killed or disappear, and the lives of American teenagers Claire Forrester and Patrick Gamble change forever. Claire is a Lycan, while Patrick's father serves with the Army in the Lycan Republic. Their complex existences eventually intersect, and both will play key roles in the violent dawning of a new world. As a Percy character might say, when you let fly with a one-two punch combination, some blows may miss. Occasionally, the allegory is a bit heavy-handed, but parables aren't known for their subtlety. The book's white-knuckle excitement more than atones for a little emotional bias. At its spellbinding best, Red Moon is a cross between Stephen King and the Michael Chabon of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, two very different writers who both give plausible wings to absurdity. If you haven't read Percy, get started. Ian Schwartz. 544pg. BOOKPAGE, c2013. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 03/15/2013 |
| Percy tries his hand at horror in his latest novel. Here, he envisions a world divided between those infected with a disease that turns them into lycans and those who are disease free. Patrick climbs aboard a plane headed to his mother's as his military father leaves for an assignment. After takeoff, a lycan wreaks havoc, killing everyone in the cabin area except for Patrick, who hides under a pile of dead bodies. Dubbed "Miracle Boy" by the media, the teen tries to live down his instant fame but seems destined instead to be haunted by it. Meanwhile, lycan Claire witnesses the terrifying murder of her parents and flees ahead of the mysterious avenging agency that seems dedicated to killing off the lycan population. A man with questionable character who may or may not run for president, a woman married to a lycan ringleader and a lycan rebel round out the large cast of characters in this novel about the struggle between the lycans and their uninfected counterparts. At stake: the lycan nation's place in society and a country that was once theirs and the toll the escalating war between the two is taking. The smaller story follows the growing romance between Patrick and Claire. Running with gore--almost every page drips blood--and soaked in violence, the book switches back and forth between characters. Percy elbows his way into the horror genre, adding literary polish along the way, but this tale rambles on much too long, with page after page of superfluous detail. Percy leans toward colorful and obscure terms or word usages that will propel many casual readers to pause and pull out their dictionaries, often with unsatisfying results. Percy births an interesting concept that he then submerges in a writing style that is both affected and self-consciously literary. 544pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 11/19/2012 |
| Some things wicked this way come; in fact, they're here, living among us as our friends and lovers and relatives. They've been controlled by drugs and strictly enforced law, but that will change when the red moon rises. Billed as literary horror-think Joe Hill and Justin Cronin-and in fact, like Cronin, Percy has impeccable literary credentials; he's won a Whiting, a Plimpton, and two Pushcart Prizes; preempted or auctioned in eight countries. 544p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2012. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 02/18/2013 |
| Benjamin Percy's extraordinary new supernatural thriller is a blend of alternate history and weird fiction that holds a mirror up to contemporary America to reflect its fears and biases.The novel opens with scenes that will resonate powerfully for anyone attuned to global events of the past decade: a father saying goodbye to his son before the father, a military reservist, deploys to a remote country where a fanatical sect holds sway, and an engineered terrorist attack that brings three jetliners down on American soil in a single day. In both instances, the antagonists are not jihadists, but lycans: lupine shapeshifters who have lived among regular humans since prehistoric times, and who in 21st-century America are a stigmatized subclass, forced to suppress their bestial nature pharmacologically. In quick succession, Percy introduces the characters who are the major players in his novel's drama: teenager Patrick Gamble, the sole survivor of the airplane attacks; Claire Forrester, a teenage lycan on the run from government agents who killed her parents; Chase Williams, the opportunistic governor of Oregon (where most of the tale is set) who hopes to exploit fears engendered by the terrorist attack in his bid for the presidency; and Miriam, Claire's aunt, who has defected from the lycan resistance movement (headed by her husband), which takes credit for the terrorist attacks. Patrick briefly falls in with a group of scary antilycan skinheads who call themselves "the Americans" before befriending Claire. Patrick's father becomes a victim in the military occupation of the Lupine Republic, which is situated between Russia and Finland but is seemingly modeled on Iraq and Afghanistan. Chase becomes infected with the lobos prion that causes lycanthropy, and struggles to hide this from the public until a vaccine can be perfected. And the resistance, responding to increasingly inflammatory antilycan laws, plots ever more outrageous terrorist acts that escalate to an explosive denouement. Percy lends his novel's events credibility by working out a convincing pathology and epidemiology for the lobos prion, and situating the lycan struggle at the center of historical moments that echo 20th-century eugenics experiments, the civil rights movement, the '60s Days of Rage, and the current "war on terror," whose rhetoric he adapts brilliantly to his story's purposes. His precision-crafted prose conveys an astonishing amount of detail in as few words as necessary, as in this description of Claire's lupine transformation: "Her bones stretch and bend and pop, and she yowls in pain, as if she is giving birth, one body coming out of another." The confidence and assuredness with which Percy tells his story compel him to take some risks that pay off in a shocker of a finale that follows through audaciously on the possibilities of his tale's premise. By tapping the zeitgeist of the contemporary sociopolitical climate and distilling it into a potent myth concerned with the tyranny of the majority and the demonization of the Other, he has written an ambitious, epic novel that deserves to reach a larger readership beyond genre audiences. Stefan Dziemianowicz is co-editor of Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. 544p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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9781455501663,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 06/16/2013 |
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