11/21/2022
Harvey’s inventive, epic-length near-future paranormal thriller kicks off with a surefire hook. Army Intelligence officer Ed Templegard, rowboating with the president at Camp David, gets tasked with spying on Theta Force, the top psychics in the U.S. military, after Theta’s head of security has gone missing —and the team has reportedly turned up evidence of a plot by literal Nazis. Templegard is skeptical of psychic phenomenon himself, though in dreams his inner psychic self connects to a pair of adversaries, the beautiful Captain Nastassia Slayevsky of Russia’s elite Psychotronic Corps, and Perse, leader of the Blueturbans, who once oversaw Templegard’s torture, and now is attempting to impose strict religious law on the world. From there, Harvey continually upends reader expectations, paying off these disparate elements yet also daring to go bigger and stranger, the in-the-moment suspense connected to the mind-blowingly cosmic.
Mad leaders, AIs, Nostradamus, numerology, the ancient secret history of the brain, militaries scrambling for a potential World War 3: Pandemonium lives up to its title, moving fast, continually raising the stakes, and never settling into predictability as the story romps from a Middle East in turmoil to the White House Situation Room to the hot tubs of Theta Force. The pleasures of Harvey’s sprawling novel rise from its cheerful abundance, its gush of ideas, puzzles, and even jokes—one of the best, pranking on the habitual horniness of thriller narrators, finds Templegard using the technique of erotic fantasizing to keep psychics from reading his mind.
Lovers of thrillers that move fast, take bold risks, and have lots on their minds will relish the ensuing chaos—and the revelation of a greater threat, the brain-sabotaging Rebels, whose infiltration of the U.S. has been extensive. Pandemonium gets wilder as it goes, with international romance and a savvy sense of how media shapes minds, nations, and history—at its heart pulses perhaps the greatest conspiracy theory in human history.
Takeaway: This inventive and epic psychic thriller finds the world facing war and an ancient brain conspiracy.
Great for fans of: Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort.
Production grades Cover: A- Design and typography: A- Illustrations: N/A Editing: A- Marketing copy: A
