PositiveBookPageHas the kind of gimmick memorable enough to stick in the mind after a glance at the jacket flap ... It would be easy to hang an entire novel on the strength of this conceit, with its blazing metaphorical resonances and its attendant drawbacks, which would do Cronenberg proud. Instead, Hurley uses it as the starting point for an old-fashioned tale of time displacement ... As complicated as this device may seem, it works because it remains fully in service to a story about war and its human cost ...The wider cast, though intriguing and full of individual quirks, never come through for the reader in the way Dietz does, with good reason. The isolation inherent to living out events in the wrong sequence forcibly evokes the isolation of active duty ... While Hurley leaves several character elements to be unwound with the story—blink and you’ll miss the fleeting mention of the protagonist’s gender—there is nothing coy about The Light Brigade At times, the author’s bloody-minded determination to deliver the message risks turning the story into a lecture, most noticeably in a subplot composed of transcribed conversations with a prisoner of war who monologues like a Bond villain. At its best, however, Hurley’s verb-laden first-person is as immediate and inescapable as a resounding sock in the jaw. At nearly 400 pages, The Light Brigade nonetheless goes down quickly, which is just as well—the nonlinear plot will have you calculating when to fit the reread in.
M. R. Carey
MixedBookpage...Carey explores a subtler infestation in Someone Like Me, juxtaposing two troubled women whose coping mechanisms have taken on lives of their own ... At its bloodiest and most baleful, Someone Like Me can’t quite work up the Gone Girl level of feminist shock it aims for...but its human-focused horror should be a draw for the Stranger Things crowd ... Someone Like Me plumbs familiar horror premises to find a few new ingredients for the old Hyde formula.
