“INVASION – 2:35 P.D.T. 6.28.36 – MIND YOUR ESCAPE”
Alice Walker – Bestagram (12 millions likes and counting)
27-year-old psychic Alice Walker has a lot to live up to. After previously predicting a major earthquake that devastated the West Coast a decade earlier, she became known as the Lady Prophet… right up until the government snatched her up and held her captive for years.
And now she’s free and predicting another mysterious, world-changing event.
Computer Hacker Henrik “Gus” Gustavo has problems of his own. After breaking out of the secret government facility where he and Alice where interred, he’s been doing his best to keep a low profile.
Which mostly works… until Alice calls him to meet, followed by agents from our government and others waiting to find them.
18-year-old Myles Harper has just graduated from high school and is faced with what he believes is the worst thing a person can face: finding a job.
That’s going to be the easy part. Because once he becomes a youth counselor at Camp Friendly Forest, nestled in the High Sierras a few hundred miles north of Los Angeles, he’s going to have a front-row seat for a massive alien invasion.
In his latest trip into the Terrafide universe, author Ryan Hyatt has raised the stakes in the dystopian, cyberpunk-influenced world he has been building these last few years.
Part Goonies, part Independence Day, part Transformers, The Initiates delivers everything you could expect from a Ryan Hyatt tale: killer robot puppets, Russian Assassins, aggressive children’s toys, giant mechanical war machines. And people learning to cope with their limits and surpass them in order to save the world.
Diving back into the Terrafide world previously seen in Rise of the Liberators, The Psychic’s Memoirs, PsychoTherapy, and a host of others, Hyatt reassembles some of his most interesting characters and adds a few new ones, managing to keep each one distinct and honest.
And what’s most interesting is the effortlessness of his storytelling, especially with the neat trick he’s pulling. Like Stephen King, Hyatt is able to draw characters from his previous works and drop them into this book without having to regurgitate endless backstory to bring you up to speed. The great thing about this book is that you don’t HAVE to have read the previous ones to get what’s going on. Sure, it will make the read much richer, but it’s not mandatory. This isn’t a test. It’s a thrill ride, a rocketing roller coaster through an apocalyptic fun-house, designed by James Cameron and Stan Winston. It just goes and goes….
Hyatt keeps the pace brisk and clean, jumping from one character to another with ease and grace, maintaining a breakneck frenzy as he brings apocalypse to the shores of California. (A speech from the President before the first major action evokes both chills and laughter in equal measure.)
I’d share more excerpts, but that would just spoil the fun. And I’m looking forward to the next book to see what he does with all the neat toys he’s brought out of his toybox.
“At 2:35 p.m., a mile-long alien ship appeared from a wormhole that materialized outside Earth’s atmosphere and discharged the massive freighter, which hurtled across the sky and crashed into the Pacific. Video footage taken from surfers congregating on a hill at a beach near Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, shows vestiges of a tsunami wiping out a portion of the Interstate 5 Freeway, displacing cars, trucks, and dragging onto shore piles of seaweed, fish, and trash. A jarring scene follows consisting of blaring horns, mobilizing troops, and soldiers arresting the blond trespassers in wet suits as fighter jets scramble through the clouds above toward the wrecked spaceship jutting out from the ocean. Meanwhile, the real threat arrives.”
RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars
Creative Team: Ryan Hyatt (writer)
Publisher: Liminal Books
Click here to purchase.
