Stormland
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3.8 • 24 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
They call it Stormland: a sprawling, largely abandoned region of the southeastern coast of the USA, where climate change’s extreme weather conditions have brought about a “perfect storm” of perpetual tempests; where hurricane-strength storms return day after day, 365 days a year.
The heart of Stormland is Charleston, South Carolina, a flooded ruin where hundreds of people remain for their own peculiar reasons; where thugs prey on the weak, and a strangely benevolent cult tries to keep everyone insanely sane. Here, plutocratic evil takes advantage of Stormland’s lawlessness to cultivate a weirdly puppeted theater of cruelty.
Swept into the turbulent vortex of Stormland is an unlikely duo—a former serial killer and a former US Marshal—who must work together to bring light to America’s late twenty-first century heart of darkness.
A cyberpunk detective thriller set in a maelstrom of climatic upheaval, classism, and corrupt power, Stormland paradoxically dramatizes the resilience of the human spirit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this gripping dystopian novel, Shirley (Eclipse) extrapolates a grim vision of a late-21st-century U.S. wracked by climate change. Former U.S. Marshal Darryl Webb is now a world-weary freelance tracker hired to find a missing serial killer believed to be in Stormland, a 400-mile stretch of devastated southeast U.S. coastline. Some 2,000 squatters live in the ruins of Charleston, inhabiting lawless, flooded enclaves—among them an eerie pseudo-religious cult, a gang of drug dealers, scavenger-refugees, and Gerald Fogle, Webb's quarry. But Gerald, who's been medically mind-altered with "Neuro-Cellular Behavioral Modification," is a new man. No longer the killer he was, he now devotes his time to altruistically helping Stormland's suffering people. Threads involving "experiencers" who install mind-control implants to drive their doomed victims for their own heinous entertainment and a pharmaceutical executive who finds redemption from his destructive greed propel the intricate, action-filled plot as Webb comes to find meaning in his life. Howling super-hurricanes, grisly torture scenes, and the horrors of scientific experimentation on human brains make for harrowing reading. This is a sober warning about the seductive dangers of power.
