Ubo

by Steve Rasnic Tem

Daniel is trapped in Ubo. He has no idea how long he has been imprisoned there by the roaches. Every resident has a similar memory of the journey to a dream of dry, chitinous wings crossing the moon, the gigantic insects dropping swiftly over the houses of the neighborhood, passing through walls and windows as if by magic, or science.  The creatures, like a deck of baroquely ornamented cards, fanning themselves from one hidden world into the next. And now each day they force Daniel to play a different figure from humanity's violent history, from a frenzied Jack the Ripper to a stumbling and confused Stalin to a self-proclaimed god executing survivors atop the ruins of the world. The scenarios mutate day after day in this camp somewhere beyond the rules of time. As skies burn and prisoners go mad, identities dissolve as the experiments evolve, and no one can foretell their mysterious end.

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia, Adult, Post Apocalyptic, Speculative Fiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 2017

About the author

Steve Rasnic Tem was born in Lee County Virginia in the heart of Appalachia. He is the author of over 350 published short stories and is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His story collections include City Fishing, The Far Side of the Lake, In Concert (with wife Melanie Tem), Ugly Behavior, Celestial Inventories, and Onion Songs. An audio collection, Invisible, is also available. His novels include Excavation, The Book of Days, Daughters, The Man In The Ceiling (with Melanie Tem), and the recent Deadfall Hotel.

Reviews

[Char · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ubo is difficult to talk about without sounding insane. There are so many thought provoking questions here, all locked up with roaches holding the keys. I know, I know...insane.

I have to touch on the basic outline here to make any sense at all of this review. Daniel goes from sitting in an airport contemplating walking away from it all, (including his wife and their sickly son), to living out scenarios of the most violent events in the history of the world, with only a vague, surreal, memory of wings and a moon separating the two.

When I say living out violent scenarios, I mean from inside the very heads of those doling out said violence. Jack the Ripper. Jim Jones. Charles Whitman. Here you are, witnessing these crimes as if it were you perpetrating them, while at the same time finding your conscience and your stomach recoiling. What possible good could come out of that? If there IS something good, can it be discovered and/or implemented before humanity destroys itself? You'll have to read this to find out.

I requested this ARC from NetGalley and Solaris because I have been a huge fan of Mr. Tem's short stories over the years. I remember his name always showing up in horror anthologies and knew I could depend on him to give me a good thrill. This book, however, is more of a science fiction novel with horrific elements-but all of his intense, strong writing? It's still here.

There's so much more I want to say, but...spoilers. Many things are going on in the background that beg for your attention, important things. Commentary about humanity really, where it is going and where it has been. Much of it is unpleasant. Somehow though, I found hope at the end. Is that because I couldn't face the stark reality, (not that far off from our current reality, by the way), or because I truly do think there's hope? I'm not sure. This is one of those times where I wish the author was my friend and I could just call him up and ask him. Since that's not happening, I'll settle for hearing what YOU think.

Highly recommended for those readers that enjoy turning over the reigns to a trusted author and believing that they will bring it all home. Go ahead and discover if there's even any home left. Read Ubo.

Ubo is available February 9th. You can pre-order your copy here: Ubo

*Thanks to NetGalley and Solaris for the e-Arc of Ubo in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it.*

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you like your SF dark? Do you like it grim? Then pull up a chair - Ubo is darker than night-time in Rupert Murdoch’s heart and grimmer than cold porridge for breakfast in a Siberian gulag.

Steve Rasnik Tem’s novel centres around a large group of men and women incarcerated in a huge, near derelict building they know only as ‘Ubo’.

All the inmates in Ubo have awakened after a strange dream of chitinous wings, of rustling insect parts, to find themselves the prisoners of what appear to be giant cockroaches. They don’t know where they are, they don’t know why they are there and they don’t know what has happened to their friends and family. If they disobey the roaches they are punished, or even disappeared, and they live in fear of their massive armored-and-barbed turnkeys.

This would all be quite enough to drive the average person crackers, but most days the roaches drag prisoners from their rooms and force them to participate in experiments where through some strange confluence of memory and VR they experience, visceral, completely realistically, the point-of-view of some of history’s worst killers. Jack the Ripper. Hitler. Himmler. Stalin. Pol Pot. Richard Speck. Charles Whitman. And hundreds of other torturers, rapists and sadistic killers. While in the minds of these monsters they sometimes retain their own minds, recoiling at what they see, other times they lose sight of their own separate selves, merging with their host in ways that amplify the horror and disgust they feel when they are eventually freed from their simulations.

The inmates of ubo are likened to concentration camp prisoners several times, and their inhuman, brutal guards, their squalid living conditions, and their forced participation in what appear to be experiments of some sort hammers the comparison home.

Daniel, the central character of the novel, is desperate to return to his family, and discover why he is in Ubo. Through exploring his prison and the experiences of his fellow inmates he journeys towards discovering the truth about where he is and why he is being experimented on.

This novel is a pretty gripping read. The juxtaposition of the prisoners’ strange jail with the historical murders they are forced to re-enact, the sense of mystery around where they are, and what the roaches want from them make for an interesting and mysterious story that explores the violent side of human nature. As the story develops the sometimes dark histories of each inmate are revealed, giving the reader glimpses of why they might have been chosen for the experiments they endure.

The plot in Ubo takes some interesting turns and genuinely surprised me.

One of the plot twists reminds me a little of a similar concept in a Dan Simmons novel. The central character of Simmon's Olympos is the re-embodiment of a man from the past- his memories and personality placed into a new body. Tem runs with a similar concept in Ubo, although he takes it in a different direction and delivers a great twist near the book's end.

This a ripping read, and well worth your time, although it does deal with some fairly horrifying events so I would avoid it if you are squeamish about mass murderers, war crimes and psychological torture. Tem paints a very dark picture, but his novel is a complex, engaging and ultimately rewarding experience.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Things that were never supposed to happen, they happen all the time.”

This was a weird one for me. Have you ever had one of those books that no matter what you did you just couldn't make any progress? Total fucking time warp. This took me forever to finish it and I read several books in between. It wasn't boring and I liked the story, but for whatever reason it just seemed like I read it and read it and never made any headway. I almost gave up. Not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because I couldn't make any fucking progress no matter how much I read it. Weird. Twilight Zone shit. Would make a good short story, probably – “The Never Ending Novel” or maybe “The Man Who Couldn’t Finish a Book and Drove Himself Bat-Shit Crazy.” I still can’t believe I started this Feb 17th and just finished it March 8th. Doesn’t make any sense. Never happened to me before. How could I still enjoy it? I have no idea. But, I did.

The world is in shambles. Roaches in lab coats are preforming strange experiments on human captives, forcing them to jump into the minds of history’s most violent and notorious.

The scenarios are taking a toll and Daniel and his fellow prisoners can think of nothing but when (if ever) they will be allowed to go back to their old lives and the families they left behind. Welcome to Ubo. Wherever the hell that is.

Despite my aforementioned reading malfunction, I really did enjoy this one, I just wish it would have read smoother for me. I am pretty sure it was all my fault and not the authors. 3.5 Stars.

*I received an advance review copy of this release from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[The Shayne-Train · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this story is a total mindtrip.

I'll be honest, right all up in the fronty-front: I'm not one for surrealistic dream-sequence-type narratives. It gets tiresome for me really quick. And the very plot of this story made it impossible for sizable chunks to be written any other way. That being said, this never felt like a slog, or a chore. I was right there, in the dream sequence, confused as all hell but interested and invested. (My dream sequences come equipped with "Saved by the Bell" fuzzy pink borders, because that's how I roll.



So the story breaks down like this: Daniel, just some dude, had been kidnapped and is now held in a research facility by a bunch of giant cockroaches that force him to mind-jump into historical serial killers and other evil figures so the insects can discover why humans do bad stuff. Doesn't that sound AMAZING? Good new: IT IS!!

I loved this book. It was trippy, educational, heart-feelzy, unexpected, bloody, and thinky. All that. I've never read a book quite like this before. And I loved it.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel went to sleep on earth, but awoke on Ubo---an place of unknown origin, maybe in the future, maybe on another planet. All he knows now is that he was carried here on the membranous wings of the roach-like aliens, who now force him to participate in.... something. An experiment, perhaps, or karmic revenge for every past atrocity humans have committed, though for its participants it's more akin to torture. When the roaches strap them down and activate the machines, they enter the minds of history's most nefarious murderers, re-living someone else's memories of death and violence and bloodshed. Through the killers' eyes, watching millions engulfed in fire and blood before they're ripped back to Ubo. And there they mill about in dystopic squalor until they're thrust back into the eyes of another maniac. There is no explanation. There is no escape. And there is no hope.

There's a long trend of authors using science fiction to examine deep real-world issues, and Ubo uses its frame work of science fictional horror as an examination of violence. Horror is most effective when it creates an atmosphere of fear, and many (if not most) fears are generated by violence. Ubo hops backwards and forwards across humanity's worst atrocities, the endless capacity for cruelty that humans can inflict upon other humans: the Mai Lai massacre, Stalin and his purges, Jack the Ripper's gruesome murders, Himmler and his grim accountant-like ledgers of genocide. It's a fascinating meditation of humanity's dark underbelly, as the participants of this torturous experiment each proclaim their humanity---"we're not like them!"---right before revealing their own dark secrets. That's the fear that Ubo uses, the lurking dread that some capacity for unrestrained violence lurks within us all...

I didn't find out about Ubo's early origins until after I'd read it---in fact, I didn't find out until after I'd already written a draft of this review. To some degree, I'm not surprised; overall, the dialogue is a lot heavier on exposition than in Tem's more recent short stories, and there's a certain throwback pulpiness to having the alien roaches (dressed in lab coats!) herding human cattle through perverse experiments. Yet I can't say that I'd ever guess that the book originated almost forty years ago. Even though the book makes scant mention of today's issues, it still felt relevant and in-tune to today's geopolitical climate, underlying the sad fact that violence continues to be timely.

Ubo deals with a lot of dark themes, and is something of a nightmarish mind-trip that drags Daniel (and the reader) through a complex examination of violence. Just when I thought I knew where the novel was going, halfway through it started to go in another direction, and despite going over some bleak topics it ends on a fascinating note. It's more of a deep and psychological work, relying more on quiet reflection than action or scares---which should be expected, as Tem is one of the best around at writing the "quiet" horror tale. Imagine Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration as written by China Miéville or Jeff Vandermeer and you pretty much have Ubo. In this case, its cool-sounding central idea does live up to its potential, and the result is a thought-provoking novel and a very satisfying read.

[David Agranoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not for everyone but it sure as hell was for me. Steve Rasnic Tem is a veteran of the horror field. He is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. There is no doubting his skill. What he produced here is a brutal blackest black of science fiction horror novels that delivers a healthy dose of what the fuck. The first half felt like a bastard hybrid of Dark City and the the early seventies film Punishment Park. The whole book sets up a super dark mystery that once the reveals come will have you delightfully scratching your head.

UBO is an excellent example of a novel that is both science fiction and horror in equal measure. It takes a certain kind of reader but I for one found the haunting darkness of UBO to be beautiful in the level of pitch black tone it achieves. I went into the book blind about the story and was thankful that I did. So if you trust me I suggest you stop here, buy the book (or get it from your library) and come back to this review when you have read it.

OK minor spoiler warning...

UBO is a story seen through the eyes of Daniel a prisoner in Ubo. He and the other prisoners have vague memories of a life before Ubo, his family, but he doesn't know where or when Ubo is. Is it another time or world? he can't say but the prison guards are not human, they are giant cockroaches, and what view they have is of a destroyed landscape. The Roaches are not just holding them in this horrible place feeding them just enough flavorless protein paste to keep them alive, they are also using them for experiments.

These experiments involve mind swapping with some of the most notorious murders through out history. From Charles Whitman, Heinrich Himmler to Jack the Ripper. Daniel and the residents are subjected to live through the memories of the greatest killers some times more than once. The worst part is they are simply passengers. This makes these chapters hard to read in totally different way than the ones than the set-up taking place in Ubo, but the combination provides the story with a context that are bread crumbs leading to the reveal.

Daniel is a excellent point of view character and despite the limited amount of time they appear in the story the other characters are very well written. In the second half of the novel the story took a turn I was not expecting. I think personally I enjoyed the first half a tad more than the second half that seemed to go more hard sci-fi than surreal. There is no doubting that the novel was a masterpiece. I don't say that word lightly.

The first half of the book has a mystery as powerful as the setting, and that is saying something. When you mix the "I want to shoot myself" grim tone of Macarthy's The Road, with the political concepts and sheer "what the fuck is real?" of Philip K Dick you earned the word masterpiece. Read this now.

[Nikki "The Crazie Betty" V. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was so excited to read this story. The synopsis gave me all the aspects of a sci-fi alienesque dystopia that I was looking for, right down to the creepy and unsettling roaches that are running the show and keeping the characters hostage in the story. Also, the whole aspect of these people having to relive atrocities throughout the history, through the mind of the person that acted them out, had my dark feelers tingling.

Once we get to about the 75% mark though, things start to go downhill for me. The big twist actually brought the story down in my opinion. The original concept that the reader is led to believe is going on, would’ve been much more interesting. As it happened, once the big twist is revealed, I was left with more questions than answers. And not the fun philosophical questions. More of “what was the point of this?” and “what was the reason for the characters’ actions that make zero sense?”. it also created plot-holes and situations within the story that weren’t explained that made no sense and made this feel like some pseudo-spiritual story, or even more paranormal than sci-fi, which I’m not a fan of either. I also didn’t really get a horror feel to this at all, like it is marketed as.

Personally, I would say that if you’re looking for a new kind of sci-fi story, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for something that never answers even half the questions you have, and leaves you to try to fill in the missing pieces when all you have is the leftover junk from unrelated puzzles that don’t fit into the overall picture being created, then this is the story for you.

I really wish I could’ve given this a better review and rating, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for and didn’t feel like it lived up to its potential. If I had stopped reading before the big reveal, I think I would’ve enjoyed this more. But I did give this 3 stars for the fact that I was very enthralled and interested during the first 75% of the book.

Copy received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Ralph Blackburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

UBO by Steve Rasnic Tem- I've never read anything by this author though I've seen his name numerous times on paperbacks and lists of e-books. I've always associated Steve Rasnic Tem with the horror genre which I don't normally read, but this is not horror per say but horror of another kind.
UBO is a place where Daniel and his fellow prisoners have been gathered, quarantined from the outside, snatched from their past, and brought into a strange decrepit building without explanation. Speculation abounds as they are not sure if this is a lost outpost, a different world, or a bleak future era. The inmates are forced to undergo sessions of experiment where their consciousness is joined with some of the most famous and infamous mass murderers, insane killers, and depraved monsters. They live for moments inside the heads of troubled assassin Charles Whitman, a grim dark Jack the Ripper, Hitler's relentlessly evil Heinrich Himmler, and a fading grasping Joseph Stalin among others. Why they must do this and what benefit this brings is never explained to the prisoners. Things begin to get worse and each inmate scrambles to make some sense of his life and his loss.
I especially liked the parts where Daniel undergoes a session living in the heads of these heinous villains. The passages are vividly described and, at times, more alive and interesting than the daily prisoner interaction. Each monster is presented through his own thoughts and deeds, his feelings, his logic, and summed up in a damning portrait.
Meanwhile the inmates receive small hints and revelations gradually answering their frantic questions finally.
The ending is very good, more satisfying than expected, filled with more hope and joy than this world deserves. Deeply psychological, I got similar feelings and expectations from Jeff VanderMeer's recent "Authority" trilogy and some of Thomas Disch's works.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book as something you should take a chance on, I'm sure in the long run you won't regret it.

[Eugene Novikov · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is extraordinary for a while, and then deflates with the big twist, which is neither very original or well-thought-through, it seemed to me. Tem's a terrific writer and the glimpses inside the minds of history's greatest monsters at particular crossroads in their reigns are very well-executed and more interesting than the idea seems.

[Brian Richardson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made it 1/3 through this book before needing a hot, scrubby shower. Honestly this book is just relentlessly grim, dirty, depressing, and gross. I'm sure some people love that, but I'm not a masochist.

[Embla Frydenlund · Rating 1 out of 5]

Good plot, but not a good writer

[Hali · Rating 3 out of 5]

The name of this book makes sense if you read the book but if you don't it's confusing so I hear by give this book a new name "The Cockroach Manifesto" anyway this book has a great concept but I didn't like the ending. If it stuck to the idea of Cockroaches studing the human mind it would have been a five star read however in the last 4 chapters they do a 180 and frankly I think it ruins the book. I understand it's supposed to add social commentary but ehhhhh I could do without it. Also the ending didn't really wrap anything up with the main character so :/ overall great concept and execution for the first half the second half I refuse to acknowledge.

[Sem · Rating 2 out of 5]

A novel about violence, memory and awful, awful allegories.

tl;dr at Overall, as always

Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we?
Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, when the calendar showed the year 1965 or somewhere in that range, a comic book character called Magneto emerged. A Holocaust survivor, who treated mutants like his jewish brothers and sisters, claiming that ordinary humans were basically eradicating them in a repeat of one of the most awful events of history. Now, call me crazy, but I find that plot point: a) occassionally offensive as fuck; b) terribly transparent; c) clumsy and all too obvious.
So why am I talking about it? Well, because that's the big moral of Ubo, a novel that's middling for 3/4 of its length, providing entertainment by leading the reader on with a mystery and churning your guts with disgusting descriptions of violence, before taking one of the biggest nosedives I've ever read in the last quarter of the book. And also it comes out in 2017 and makes the same point (with the same gracefulness) that a bad comic book made 50 years ago.
Yes, the whole point of Ubo, a book that pushes you into the minds of literal serial killers, tyrants, and Joseph Stalin (a bit of column a, a bit of column b with that guy) is that violence is awful, some people are monsters and we must never forget that, but also some people are so monstrous that they will become monsters in order to remember the previous monsters. A lot of that word "monster" huh? Well, repetition is pretty big in this novel, so get comfortable with it.
The novel has good chapters - set in the real world, where our character tries to understand what's happening to him, imprisoned in a concentration camp by horrific insects (it's also not called a concentration camp outright, but that's probably because a smart editor said "Guys, seriously, this is so on the nose that a third-grader would get it"). And it has bad ones - where the character is submerged into the mind of some historic psychopath. These chapters, devoted to the inner workings of awful people, are lengthy and shallow at the same time, spending pages on rambling thoughts and never actually making any solid points about those maniacal musings.
But the "real world" chapters are intriguing enough to keep going, all the way up to an inane, pointless, godawful twist that has no real bearing on the plot whatsoever and, with just a little change, could have been much better, if only Tem stopped to think about what he was doing to the characters. And, of course, the book ends its story with a pointless, pseudo-humanistic whimper. And then closes out with a slap to the face: mentioning how a certain part of the story is "inspired"/"connected" to an actual Holocaust victim. Oy vey, what a clunker.

Overall, an ill-conceived attempt to... honour the victims of violence? Explore the roots of violence? Good lord, I don't know, if you like vivid imagery, read the first three quarters of this, you might enjoy it. Just don't stray too far and fall into the climax of the book. Not a treat.

I received an ARC of this title from the publisher via Netgalley

[Francesca · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5-3/5

UBO di Steve Rasnic Tem è un romanzo di fantascienza che sconfina spesso nell’horror.

La storia è incentrata su gruppo di uomini intrappolati all’interno di una struttura di ricerca, che tuttavia non hanno precisa cognizione se siano sulla terra o su un altro pianeta in una galassia lontana, né chi siano gli scarafaggi giganti (di dimensioni umane – una delle cose più carine del libro!) che gestiscono la struttura e quale sia il motivo per cui li sottopongono a una sorta di programma di cambiamento della mente e della memoria, mandandoli indietro nel tempo nella coscienza di alcuni dei personaggi più vili della storia (reale e non, così abbiamo Stalin, Jack the Ripper, Falstaff, Hitler, ecc.).

Le premesse del romanzo sono di sicuro accattivanti, soprattutto la descrizione di UBO e tutta l’incertezza angosciante su cosa sia reale, allucinazione, memoria o impianto – aspetto che ricorda molto P.K. Dick.

Purtroppo la trama non è riuscita a prendermi e a interessarmi fino in fondo e ho trovato poco azzeccato mostrare volutamente scene crude per renderle un monito più efficace – in realtà mi sono parse alquanto fini a se stesse.

Lodevole l’intento di voler mostrare quanto sia importante la storia, non dimenticare il passato collettivo per non ripetere certi errori (teoria comunque parziale e confutabile, almeno in parte), ma l’impianto narrativo non è riuscito ad avvincermi, nel complesso. Le intenzioni superano l’esecuzione.

Per fortuna non è molto lungo e si riesce a leggere velocemente.

[SheriC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not sure how to review this book without spoiling it, but what I *can* tell you is that I just could not stop reading. It kept me up all night, turning pages, because at first I just needed to know what happened next and then I needed to understand what exactly was going on, and them from about the halfway point I thought I *might* know and I was absolutely certain that I would find out on the next page, then maybe the next page, then surely the next page. Pure mind-fuckery in the end. I loved it. Highly recommend.

Paperback version, picked up on the strength of Char's review, which did not steer me wrong.

I read this book for the Booklikes Halloween Bingo 2019, for the square Stranger Things: This is a twist on the past 80's Horror square, with elements of the television show - any horror that has supernatural elements, portal/parallel universes, government plots gone awry, or is set or was written in the 1980's. This book features what appear to be portals into parallel worlds and government plots gone awry.

[Polly Krize · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Honestly, I believed that I would rave on and on about this book... With an alien race similar to cockroaches basically controlling humanity and forcing them into very uncomfortable situations, the scene could have been set for mayhem. Unfortunately the pace is so slow that I felt no connection at all with any character and felt that the plot was under-developed, leaving much to be desired in the reading...only my opinion.

[Enrique Arroyo · Rating 3 out of 5]

It just needed a little something more.

[Maria Beltrami · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniel is a human guinea pig. Along with many others, he was kidnapped, taken away from his life and family and awoke at UBO. Every day his captors, alien creatures resembling cockroaches, tune his mind to the cruelest humans who have ever lived, and the same happens to his companions. Daniel and the others wonder what is the reason that drives the cockroaches to carry out this experiment, for which they pay a very high price in terms of mental sanity, to the point that someone does not return from the labs and someone else, like Henry, who has come into contact with the mind of Gilles de Rais, goes mad forever.
One day, however, the ruined structure that houses UBO remains without power, and another horror begins...
One of the best dystopian novels I have ever read, really recommended to all those who investigate evil and its reasons.

[Brandon Mackean · Rating 2 out of 5]

This felt like another book just keeping the main character in the dark about their world for the sake of creating mystery for the reader, and once things were revealed it felt mostly pointless. There was some sort of outbreak so humans used robots to study anger? and to get it to work they had to download previous human memories into the androids but then have them go through other memories to generate anger (like reliving a holocost prison guard's memory)... meanwhile outside the facility the world is falling apart but the humans left alive are still trying to run these experiments... not sure what they were hoping to accomplish with it, but it seems like they were expending quite a few resources to do it.... The final reveal is that the main characters are androids living through these experiments and being mistreated by the guards... but for what? to me the dilemma of 'if an android has a human's mind downloaded into it, acts like a human and thinks its a human, does it still deserve life and dignity' is pretty self-evident, and not all that interesting.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think we readers have had our backstories interrupted at the precise moment we picked up this book and started reading it, midway in some dire cliffhanger of life to which we may never return? The most frightening thought of all.
You do realise, don’t you, that some never have a return, whether soft or hard, from scenarios…and you may never see them again. We readers need to compare notes about this book, triangulate its coordinates like the good gestalt Dreamcatchers we surely are, I say!

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[Manolis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Simplistic explanations for horrific actions made me cringe. Humans are complex but this book is all surface. The why is never delved into. There is no philosophy. Why all the study if no attempt at an answer. Seemed like the idea was to find horrific people from the past and put together a pastiche and connect it all to a concentration camp where expirements that go absolutely nowhere happen. Makes for an easy write when 3/4 of the book is already written for you, maybe that's the point.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fresh and inventive post-apocalypse story. Vibrant characters. The world itself became a character, the landscape reflecting human nature. Is humankind worth saving? Haven't we brought about Hell on Earth and deserve to live in our mess? Should we fight to protect our damaged and damaging souls or should we accept our fate as punishment and let the roaches rule the world?

[TJ · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's... fine at best. It doesn't tie it all together enough to convey some deep meaning, but it isn't weird enough to stand on that aspect alone. The way that things progress and the twists have the unfortunate drawback of getting less cohesive the more you think about it.

[Carson Winter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, strange, and absorbing, Tem's tale of apocalyptic mind-hopping offers glimpses into everything that makes us human.

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

Confusing and fragmented journey which thankfully ends.

[Jessy · Rating 2 out of 5]

It had some good lines and scenes but I just never wanted to read it? And personally, fuck that reveal.

[SSteppenwolFF · Rating 5 out of 5]

While this novel is singular, unique and extraordinary it does put me in mind of Harlan Ellison at his brightest and most brilliant.

[Bonnie Ustaszewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a nice blend of horror and science fiction. Daniel wakes up in Ubo and discovers that everyone stuck in Ubo has the same memories of being taken by the insects, which they call roaches. They are regularly placed in the minds of some of history's most atrocious murders and are held captive while horrible crimes are committed. The story showcases Daniel and his comrades experiences and how they attempt to figure out what Ubo is and why they were chosen for such experiments, all the while wanting to find a way to escape in order to return to their families. Of course, they have no idea if they are even still on earth.

[David Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm grateful to Solaris for an advance copy of this book.

"A blend of science fiction and horror, award-winning author Steve Rasnic Tem’s new novel is a chilling story exploring the roots of violence and its effect on a possible future."

To say that this book surprised me is putting it mildly. The two previous books by Steve Rasnic Tem that I had read - Deadfall Hotel and Blood Kin were supernatural, somewhat monstrous but - allowing for some weirdness - very much set in the here and now.

UBO is different. UBO is set in... UBO, whereever that is. It's a decaying building in a decaying city, where strange, malevolent "roaches" - giant insects - imprison and torture humans, forcing them, by some strange mind control, to inhabit the memories of notorious criminals and killers. These parts of the book are dark and very difficult to read. We hear the internal monologues, the self-justification, the arrogance, of a spree killer, of a bloodstained tyrant, a domestic abuser, a serial killer, a medieval warlord - all of them real historical people.

Running through the book, as a thread, are the self-deluding narratives of Holocaust perpetrators.

It's extremely well done, deeply, deeply chilling and at times, really nasty. The reader experiences this at one remove and that is unsettling: the conceit of having actual people kidnapped and forced to relive life after terrible life is even more awful.

And yet, in a sense, that's not the worst. There are the life stories of the prisoners themselves - seen from the viewpoint of Daniel, who gives nicknames to his own particular group: Falstaff, Lenin, Bogart, Gandhi. A common theme, again, is of the failure to control anger, of actual or potential harm to families and friends before the men - they are mostly men - were carried away to UBO. They speculate, as these hard-given up stories emerge, that they have been chosen to match the lives of those they inhabit. They muse on whether they bear guilt for the things they do in those "scenarios". They self-justify their own behaviour: most, though, are curiously incurious about where they are now, why, and what will become of them.

So it goes. The scenarios are sometimes more, sometime less violent. The world of UBO leaks into them at times. And then - everything changes. We've been fed clues, glimpses of something behind the world here, and that is eventually revealed. When it is, it makes a kind of cruel sense of what has gone before - but it is the kind of sense that makes one despair of humankind's ability ever to improve.

This is a magnificent, but such a dark, vision of humanity past, present and future. Firmly in the camp of a kind of realist science fiction - only leap of imagination is really needed here, that ability to jump into others' (past) memories - it is still in atmosphere and setting far distant from the other Rasnic Tem stories I mentioned before: even the monsters in those were more human than some of the actors here.

What a work of imagination this must have been. What an experience for the reader. Disturbing, compelling, it's a book that will remain with you long after you close it and come back from UBO.

Strongly recommended.

[Joshua Hair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ubo is quite possibly the strangest book I've read in a very long time. As a previous reviewer stated, to talk about what goes on in the book would make me sound insane, therefore I'll only say this: Ubo is odd, Ubo is difficult to comprehend and confusing to keep up with, Ubo is unsettling in a way I still don't exactly understand, and, most of all, Ubo is astoundingly good writing.