CARRIER WAVE BY ROBERT BROCKWAY: BOOK REVIEW

For those who haven’t heard of Robert Brockway, he’s a difficult cat to explain. Maybe I’d start by telling you about his first book, RX-A Tale of Electronegativity, a Terry Gilliam-esque journey through the circles of a technological hell guided by a professional drug addict. Maybe I’d start with the Vicious Circuit trilogy, where punks do their level best to headbutt their way through existential terror manifested in an army of soulless trendies. Maybe I’d simply tell you he was one of the key personalities behind cracked.com, which for a while there was the best thing to happen to internet comedy since SeanBaby.
 
For those that have heard of Brockway, I probably don’t need to tell you to be excited and curious about his latest work. Brockway’s bag of tricks is large, bulky, and stained with something that might be blood or might be barbecue sauce. When he says he’s got something a little different for you, you pay attention.
 
Enter Carrier Wave, a horror epic that is at once clever, charming and very, very brutal.
 
Reminiscent of (but not derivative of) Max Brooks World War Z, Brockway tells the story of a coming apocalypse through varied points of view, as the world tries to understand, and then survive, the horrors that await them.
 
And the horrors are horrible indeed. When a mysterious signal turns people into raving, super-powered maniacs, our various protagonists are left bloodied and bewildered. But it doesn’t stop there. There’s a pattern to the madness, an unknowable end game that must be prepared for. What follows is a relentless escalation of hostilities where surviving the slaughter of everything you knew is only the beginning.
 
The maniacs might claw at you. They might dismember you. They might do something much, much worse.
 
Chronicling the world-ending events spanning years are a mixed bag of relatable everybodies, and this is perhaps the strongest part of Carrier Wave. Each character we meet is so instantly and believably human, it’s so easy to make friends with them. But the odds are terrible and the stakes about as high as they can be. Few will survive, and fewer still will survive intact. You’ll find your heart in your mouth hoping that someone makes it, even as the sheer unlikelihood of their survival crushes your soul.
 
This is by far the least comedy-centric work Brockway has published, and, untethered a little from his aggressive absurdism, we are left with quite a deadly combination for a horror writer- someone who finds the relatable humanity in a situation, and someone who, if needed, will stoically pulverise that humanity with a lump hammer while you watch.
 
Hey, man- good horror isn’t easy to write, and sometimes it shouldn’t be easy to read.
 
Saying that, though, Carrier Wave is an absolute page turner. Despite the cosmic terror and the brutal violence, there’s intrigue and action to rival the best-written thrillers. You’ll want to know what happens next even if you’re afraid to find out. And, as epic as the scope of this novel is, the way Brockway chooses to tell it is so tight and effortless you won’t even notice that you’ve read far into the night.
 
There’s a lot to like in Carrier Wave for fans of more fantastical horror. Taking the batons from King, Romero and Lovecraft, Brockway juggles them almost casually, giving us an epidemic thriller to rival The Stand, a zombie apocalypse far more deadly than Night of the Living anything, and cosmic horrors that aren’t just glimpsed beyond the veil, but studied in a way that makes them horribly real.
 
Carrier Wave is ambitious and it lives up to its ambition. Brockway’s writing is warm, funny, astute and sometimes deeply sad. But it’s not all bleak- it is, like his other works, shot through with an almost head-shaking admiration for humanity’s own ballsiness.
 
My advice to you is to catch Carrier Wave now so you can have the warm glow of superiority of having read the original before the inevitable television adaptation is released.

CARRIER WAVE BY ROBERT BROCKWAY​

Humanity listened to the night sky. What we heard shattered the world.

Listen.

Just once. That’s it.

As soon as you hear it, it has you. And once it has you, it’s over. You may think you’re in control. You’re not. You want one more listen. You want to look at that strange spot in the sky. The one that’s been slowly growing. The one that didn’t make sense… until you listened. You want to listen again, and you will do whatever it takes to make everyone else listen. By any means necessary. Even if it kills you.

Just one more listen. One more.

Listen.

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