What do you think?
Rate this book
Exoteric
Dead men tell no tales - until you wake them up...The Russian president’s term in office is almost up and his presumptive successor is a double-agent, backed by the intelligence agencies of the West. FSB Colonel Arkady Andreyushkin has been tasked with uncovering the conspiracy, but finds only dead bodies in the traitor’s wake. Facing an impossible challenge, he sanctions a radical one which will take his rag-tag team of scientists and former agents to the outermost fringes of medical science, and beyond. On a desolate plateau, high in the Altai mountains, they prepare to commit the ultimate the resurrection, and interrogation, of the dead.
- GenresHorror
254 pages, Paperback
Published March 8, 2017
1 person is currently reading
14 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 12, 2017
A coup is brewing. Arkady is on the wrong side, and he's running out of time. There's evidence out there that will bury the traitorous pretender before he takes over, if only it can be decrypted. Only one person knows the password -- and he's been dead for more than a decade. His frozen corpse has been kept in cryogenic suspension ever since though. The country might still be saved from foreign domination, if Arkady can arrange a world first: the successful revivification of a cryogenically frozen body.
EXOTERIC is a dark, suspenseful story that turns the usual image of mad science on its head. The situation is desperate, and the characters trapped in increasing bleakness. It's a great read, packed with atmosphere and tension. As the story progresses, it slowly becomes clear that the stakes are far, far higher than anyone could have suspected.
Highly recommended.
EXOTERIC is a dark, suspenseful story that turns the usual image of mad science on its head. The situation is desperate, and the characters trapped in increasing bleakness. It's a great read, packed with atmosphere and tension. As the story progresses, it slowly becomes clear that the stakes are far, far higher than anyone could have suspected.
Highly recommended.
May 26, 2018
For some reason, I didn't want to have this book's plot given away by knowing anything about it. This is unlike me. I am generally not in the anti- spoiler/context/preconceived-notions club(s) but, in this case, I wanted to do be such. I had read Hemplow before, and trusted him to be enjoyable, but I wanted to be *confused* about where the book was going. It definitely had an impact on how I read it.
The question is, do I recommend you read it in such a way? No. This is not quite the right book for that approach. It wasn't terrible to read it as such, to guess what might be forthcoming, it's just this book is a long walk to a short story at the end. A diagram might help to explain my case.
Imagine a lunchroom table at a school cafeteria, one of those longer tables with a dozen built in seats. You start at seat one and in front of you is...something. Not food. Something else. A toy. A short encyclopedia article. A laptop open to current events news. A light snack, but very light...like a few pieces of popcorn. Only in the last seats is the meal you expect. You must get up, move down to the next seat, sit down, and then partake in whatever is there. You could skip ahead, sure, but you'd give up all those other tidbits. As you go, you get a bit hungrier and hungrier. Maybe even cranky about it. You might start spending less times at each subsequent seat, but every time you do so, you feel a little like you are missing the point.
Finally, you get to the food, and you eat it, and it's pretty good, and then you leave. You feel a little tired after the process, but kind of in a good way.
Now I know that the "technical" term for such books is slow-burn, but a slow-burn feels like the fire is already smoldering. There would have been strange visions. Things going bump. Lights would have flickered. At least one character would have waken up naked in the snow and shouting about some otherworldly entity...all to keep driving the reader to the big reveal. This book was effectively devoid of any foreshadowing outside of a couple of moral machinations in dialogue.No, this is book is more like the House of the Devil. Maybe even more like Sunshine. That sort of movie, where the horror elements are coming and you know they are, but it is easy to forget and just deal with the on-screen (or on-page) drama. The book *is* good. Great in places. This might be the strongest Hemplow has had, too date, but just know that if you do read the back of the book (and I'll leave that up to you) it will promise events that show up around the 80% mark mixed with events from the first 10% of the book. The other 70% or so is something...else.
That something else is Russian politics, Russian geography and climate, medical drama, isolation drama, dealing with personal loss and mistakes, and that old horror yarn of the militant bastard who is a bit unhinged. You fear violence, betrayal, extreme actions for a mediocre cause, perhaps even sexual assault...more than you fear the dark and unknown. If I had known more precisely what was coming, and I am ill-equipped to say whether knowing anything about this book would have made this a guaranteed entity, this majority of the book would possibly have been a slog: an impediment to narrative. As it was, for me, this simply was the book for the most part. Discussions of international politics, expatriated youth, weather, soldier guilt, cryogenics, drug abuse, and grief were Exoteric to me. Until the very near end. When the horror showed up, it was both a relief and a let-down.
Here was the grand reveal, Dear Reader, and it stood before me in its splendor...and the book simply became a thing telling me a story instead of asking me to be inside of its world. There was fear, there. Tension. Some neat ideas. A prompting of a larger, ultimately unexplained metaphysical reality...and it brought with it violence and shoot outs and screaming. I am conflicted what to think. Afterwards, the rainy night brought strange sounds as I got ready for bed. It had impacted me. Sure. But as much by what it was not as by what it was...
It is not impossible to imagine in an alternate universe, Hemplow simply chose not to make this a horror/weird novel at all, instead focusing on the futility of the various quests given to our downtrodden characters. A doctor's greed for fame and to uphold his life's quest pushes him so much that he gets in bed with monsters. A tired and broken agent playing at a game he knows he will eventually lose. A young woman who risks a nearly perfect life for the off-chance of reclaiming a youth she is no longer part of. A twisted soldier who follows orders because he barely knows anything else. An ex-addict surgeon who deals with her darker past (or, as it were, fails to deal with it). And, at the core of it, a dead man who knew something so big and groundshaking that lead to his death, this unspoken secret that might change the course of the world. Set against the backdrop of a tide change in politics that would probably not be disastrous for any of the protagonists, only disastrous to a manipulator who doesn't deserve loyalty, not really. Where that novel would have ended up, with that short horror story to aim for as a destination, I do not know.
At any rate, I have done my best to tell you little of this book that would be spoiled by the back cover. So the choice is yours. I found it to be a quite good book, but one haunted by a mask it wears while the flesh feels different. I suspect most will buy it for the mask, but I actually enjoyed seeing it maskless for the time it allowed itself to be.
The question is, do I recommend you read it in such a way? No. This is not quite the right book for that approach. It wasn't terrible to read it as such, to guess what might be forthcoming, it's just this book is a long walk to a short story at the end. A diagram might help to explain my case.
Imagine a lunchroom table at a school cafeteria, one of those longer tables with a dozen built in seats. You start at seat one and in front of you is...something. Not food. Something else. A toy. A short encyclopedia article. A laptop open to current events news. A light snack, but very light...like a few pieces of popcorn. Only in the last seats is the meal you expect. You must get up, move down to the next seat, sit down, and then partake in whatever is there. You could skip ahead, sure, but you'd give up all those other tidbits. As you go, you get a bit hungrier and hungrier. Maybe even cranky about it. You might start spending less times at each subsequent seat, but every time you do so, you feel a little like you are missing the point.
Finally, you get to the food, and you eat it, and it's pretty good, and then you leave. You feel a little tired after the process, but kind of in a good way.
Now I know that the "technical" term for such books is slow-burn, but a slow-burn feels like the fire is already smoldering. There would have been strange visions. Things going bump. Lights would have flickered. At least one character would have waken up naked in the snow and shouting about some otherworldly entity...all to keep driving the reader to the big reveal. This book was effectively devoid of any foreshadowing outside of a couple of moral machinations in dialogue.No, this is book is more like the House of the Devil. Maybe even more like Sunshine. That sort of movie, where the horror elements are coming and you know they are, but it is easy to forget and just deal with the on-screen (or on-page) drama. The book *is* good. Great in places. This might be the strongest Hemplow has had, too date, but just know that if you do read the back of the book (and I'll leave that up to you) it will promise events that show up around the 80% mark mixed with events from the first 10% of the book. The other 70% or so is something...else.
That something else is Russian politics, Russian geography and climate, medical drama, isolation drama, dealing with personal loss and mistakes, and that old horror yarn of the militant bastard who is a bit unhinged. You fear violence, betrayal, extreme actions for a mediocre cause, perhaps even sexual assault...more than you fear the dark and unknown. If I had known more precisely what was coming, and I am ill-equipped to say whether knowing anything about this book would have made this a guaranteed entity, this majority of the book would possibly have been a slog: an impediment to narrative. As it was, for me, this simply was the book for the most part. Discussions of international politics, expatriated youth, weather, soldier guilt, cryogenics, drug abuse, and grief were Exoteric to me. Until the very near end. When the horror showed up, it was both a relief and a let-down.
Here was the grand reveal, Dear Reader, and it stood before me in its splendor...and the book simply became a thing telling me a story instead of asking me to be inside of its world. There was fear, there. Tension. Some neat ideas. A prompting of a larger, ultimately unexplained metaphysical reality...and it brought with it violence and shoot outs and screaming. I am conflicted what to think. Afterwards, the rainy night brought strange sounds as I got ready for bed. It had impacted me. Sure. But as much by what it was not as by what it was...
It is not impossible to imagine in an alternate universe, Hemplow simply chose not to make this a horror/weird novel at all, instead focusing on the futility of the various quests given to our downtrodden characters. A doctor's greed for fame and to uphold his life's quest pushes him so much that he gets in bed with monsters. A tired and broken agent playing at a game he knows he will eventually lose. A young woman who risks a nearly perfect life for the off-chance of reclaiming a youth she is no longer part of. A twisted soldier who follows orders because he barely knows anything else. An ex-addict surgeon who deals with her darker past (or, as it were, fails to deal with it). And, at the core of it, a dead man who knew something so big and groundshaking that lead to his death, this unspoken secret that might change the course of the world. Set against the backdrop of a tide change in politics that would probably not be disastrous for any of the protagonists, only disastrous to a manipulator who doesn't deserve loyalty, not really. Where that novel would have ended up, with that short horror story to aim for as a destination, I do not know.
At any rate, I have done my best to tell you little of this book that would be spoiled by the back cover. So the choice is yours. I found it to be a quite good book, but one haunted by a mask it wears while the flesh feels different. I suspect most will buy it for the mask, but I actually enjoyed seeing it maskless for the time it allowed itself to be.
March 7, 2018
Read this review and more on my blog at [Roxie Writes].
‘Exoteric’ by Philip Hemplow
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5
Finished on March 2, 2018
GIVEN A FREE COPY IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW
$6.11 on Kindle | $14.99 in Paperback
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
The Russian president’s term in office is almost up and his presumptive successor is a double-agent, backed by the intelligence agencies of the West. FSB Colonel Arkady Andreyushkin is tasked with uncovering this conspiracy, but finds only dead bodies in the traitor’s wake.
Arkady decides the best way to keep this presidency is to sanction a radical experiment. Along with a scientist, a surgeon, and former agents, they plan to resurrect (and question) the dead.
They get more than they bargained for, though, with their plan because the dead have other plans.
MY REVIEW:
I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
‘Exoteric’ is, in its own way, a modern-day Frankenstein. You’ve got a “mad” scientist, his helpers, and an undead monster.
Arkady and the rest believe they are going to resurrect the only man who can stop a traitor from becoming president. This man has been dead for over ten years, but his body has been cryogenically frozen. The hope is that when thawed out and resurrected, he will be able to speak to them and give them the information they need.
To perform this ground-breaking act, they have to travel to a remote mountain encampment and while they’re there, they get snowed in by a huge storm. When they finally succeed in their task, they quickly realize they are trapped with a monster they did not expect to encounter.
This is a dark and intriguing tale. It’s a haunting story that makes you think about what lies after death.
‘Exoteric’ by Philip Hemplow
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5
Finished on March 2, 2018
GIVEN A FREE COPY IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW
$6.11 on Kindle | $14.99 in Paperback
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
The Russian president’s term in office is almost up and his presumptive successor is a double-agent, backed by the intelligence agencies of the West. FSB Colonel Arkady Andreyushkin is tasked with uncovering this conspiracy, but finds only dead bodies in the traitor’s wake.
Arkady decides the best way to keep this presidency is to sanction a radical experiment. Along with a scientist, a surgeon, and former agents, they plan to resurrect (and question) the dead.
They get more than they bargained for, though, with their plan because the dead have other plans.
MY REVIEW:
I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
‘Exoteric’ is, in its own way, a modern-day Frankenstein. You’ve got a “mad” scientist, his helpers, and an undead monster.
Arkady and the rest believe they are going to resurrect the only man who can stop a traitor from becoming president. This man has been dead for over ten years, but his body has been cryogenically frozen. The hope is that when thawed out and resurrected, he will be able to speak to them and give them the information they need.
To perform this ground-breaking act, they have to travel to a remote mountain encampment and while they’re there, they get snowed in by a huge storm. When they finally succeed in their task, they quickly realize they are trapped with a monster they did not expect to encounter.
This is a dark and intriguing tale. It’s a haunting story that makes you think about what lies after death.
March 16, 2017
“We have our dead body, we have our mad scientist, we have lightning...”
Another terrific and finely-polished slab of horror from Philip Hemplow.
FSB Colonel Arkady Andreyushkin has taken on the task of interrogating a dead man. The deceased is a cryogenically preserved oligarch, so all Arkady has to do is whisk the body away to a deserted Siberian health resort, assemble the necessary scientists and supervise while they break new frontiers in medicine…
Except that matters are complicated by the need for co-operation from the dead man’s daughter.
And the fact that Arkady’s security detail is headed by a man who is worryingly known as the Ogre, for exploits which are extreme even by KGB standards, and who may have his own agenda.
And the rapidly-moving political situation which means Arkady will need to get the information soon, that powerful forces are likely to try and stop him, and that those who assassinated the oligarch may not want him to come back.
And the scientist in charge of the resurrection may not be that stable.
And the weather is closing in.
All this would be enough for a terrific techno-thriller, but we are deep in Hemplow territory here, and that ratchets up the darkness and horror elements considerably. Suffice to say that attempting to bring back the dead may have dramatic and entirely unintended, not to say unexpected consequences.
The contrasting characters are well drawn, and their complex interactions ensure that the plot is never predictable. There is medical gore aplenty, and a wonderfully atmospheric setting – you can practically see the movie. The story moves along at a rattling pace, with some satisfying twists, and builds to a grand and gruesome finale. Highly recommended.
Another terrific and finely-polished slab of horror from Philip Hemplow.
FSB Colonel Arkady Andreyushkin has taken on the task of interrogating a dead man. The deceased is a cryogenically preserved oligarch, so all Arkady has to do is whisk the body away to a deserted Siberian health resort, assemble the necessary scientists and supervise while they break new frontiers in medicine…
Except that matters are complicated by the need for co-operation from the dead man’s daughter.
And the fact that Arkady’s security detail is headed by a man who is worryingly known as the Ogre, for exploits which are extreme even by KGB standards, and who may have his own agenda.
And the rapidly-moving political situation which means Arkady will need to get the information soon, that powerful forces are likely to try and stop him, and that those who assassinated the oligarch may not want him to come back.
And the scientist in charge of the resurrection may not be that stable.
And the weather is closing in.
All this would be enough for a terrific techno-thriller, but we are deep in Hemplow territory here, and that ratchets up the darkness and horror elements considerably. Suffice to say that attempting to bring back the dead may have dramatic and entirely unintended, not to say unexpected consequences.
The contrasting characters are well drawn, and their complex interactions ensure that the plot is never predictable. There is medical gore aplenty, and a wonderfully atmospheric setting – you can practically see the movie. The story moves along at a rattling pace, with some satisfying twists, and builds to a grand and gruesome finale. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews