Godfall
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2024 Midwest Book Award
Gold Winner for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book Award
Longlisted for 2024 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
When a massive asteroid hurtles toward Earth, humanity braces for annihilation—but the end doesn’t come. In fact, it isn’t an asteroid but a three-mile-tall alien that drops down, seemingly dead, outside Little Springs, Nebraska. Dubbed “the giant,” its arrival transforms the red-state farm town into a top-secret government research site and major metropolitan area, flooded with soldiers, scientists, bureaucrats, spies, criminals, conspiracy theorists—and a murderer.
As the sheriff of Little Springs, David Blunt thought he’d be keeping the peace among the same people he’d known all his life, not breaking up chanting crowds of conspiracy theorists in tiger masks or struggling to control a town hall meeting about the construction of a mosque. As a series of brutal, bizarre murders strikes close to home, Blunt throws himself into the hunt for a killer who seems connected to the Giant. With bodies piling up and tensions in Little Springs mounting, he realizes that in order to find the answers he needs, he must first reconcile his old worldview with the town he now lives in—before it’s too late.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the clever but crammed sci-fi debut from graphic novelist Jensen (Arca), Nebraskan sheriff David Blunt investigates a series of brutal murders tied to a giant alien carcass nicknamed Gulliver that has recently crashed to Earth on the outskirts of town. When David finds his cousin Jason dead with strange markings carved into his flesh in the same pattern as those on Gulliver, he plunges into a comic-book world of action and weirdness, infiltrating a cult that worships Gulliver and discovering that the U.S. military commander in charge of security around the crash site is selling Gulliver's crystalline secretions as a hallucinogen to cult members who claim it allows them to see God. Another of Gulliver's curious side effects: the town's Alzheimer's patients, among them David's grandfather, regain lucidness for two minutes every evening, allowing David a window into his family history, including his parents' deaths in a tornado and what drove away his long-lost cousin, who he knew as Ben. This cousin, a transgender woman now going by Charlotte, returns to town as a TV reporter—and David vows to protect her from the killer who's still on the loose. Jensen has a knack for page-turning car chases, shoot-outs, and bar fights, and he lovingly captures the Nebraskan prairie, but the narrative is bloated with fizzling subplots. Readers will initially be wowed, but the story can't sustain its swagger.
