Black Helicopters
-
-
4.0 • 13 Ratings
-
-
- $4.99
-
- $4.99
Publisher Description
A dark jewel of a novella, this definitive edition of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Black Helicopters is the expanded and completed version of the World Fantasy Award-nominated original.
Just as the Signalman stood and faced the void in Agents of Dreamland, so it falls to Ptolema, a chess piece in her agency’s world-spanning game, to unravel what has become tangled and unknowable.
Something strange is happening on the shores of New England. Something stranger still is happening to the world itself, chaos unleashed, rational explanation slipped loose from the moorings of the known. Two rival agencies stare across the Void at one another. Two sisters, the deadly, sickened products of experiments going back decades, desperately evade their hunters.
An invisible war rages at the fringes of our world, with unimaginable consequences and Lovecraftian horrors that ripple centuries into the future.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nominated for a World Fantasy Award when originally published in shorter form in 2013, this short novel is set in a world convulsed by skillfully evoked cosmic horrors and populated by the semisupernatural agents fighting them. It spans the period 1966 2152 but takes place predominantly in 2012, in the wake of an invasion of Lovecraftian entities off the coast of Maine. Among those fighting to contain the invasion are Sixty-Six, the descendant of a victim of a CIA behavioral engineering experiment, and the psionically gifted albino Ivoire. She and her identical twin, B te, have been tracked by Ptolema, an ageless espionage agent with inscrutable motives, to Dublin. As the narrative ping-pongs among different decades and various locales, sinister associations emerge that link the tale's events and their players, heightening the mood of paranoia and conjuring a sense of mysteries whose solutions may ultimately be unknowable. Kiernan's novella is well-wrought dark fantasy struck from the template of the black-ops thriller.
Customer Reviews
Nightmarish and Atmospheric
“Black Helicopters” is the second book in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Tinfoil Dossier series, but it isn’t as much a sequel as a another tale set in the same dark universe. It does have a brief cameo by the Signalman, protagonist of the first Tinfoil Dossier volume “Agents of Dreamland.”
I have to admit that this is a much less linear and understandable story than “Agents.” It changes point of view characters and points in time with each chapter. In spite of this, each chapter is very atmospheric and the scenes depicted in each one leave an impression on the reader. The locations involved include: Deer Island Maine, where the sea has become thick and malevolent; Dublin Ireland where agents play deadly games to obtain information; and a future colony on Mars where an unspeakable event may soon happen.
The main characters include a pair of pale twins, who seem to be bonded in more ways than usual. These are pursued by an Egyptian Agent who is older than anyone should be. However, we are also involved with several other characters through the novella, who come into contact with these players. Each chapter is almost like a puzzle piece, which helps to fill in the picture as it is fitted together.
This second volume in the Tinfoil Dossier Series is very different in composition than the first, but it shares the same tone, a malevolent dread of cosmic horrors. It is a great example of modern dark fantasy inspired by H. P. Lovecraft.
A Dark, Complex Bouquet
A complicated, literate tale that makes use of the Cthulhu Mythos without being primarily about it. Most of it was written before Agents of Dreamland, so it can be read on its own with little lost. Chapters jump times and points of view. The book is a mosaic, a puzzle assembled by the readers. You never get all the pieces, but you see enough of the picture.