C. Robert Cargill has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 76 ratings. The most-rated is Sea of Rust.
Sea of Rust
Summary
A scavenger robot wanders in the wasteland created by a war that has destroyed humanity in this evocative postapocalyptic "robot Western" from the critically acclaimed author, screenwriter, and noted film critic. It's been 30 years since the apocalypse and 15 years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI - One World Intelligence, the shared consciousness of millions of robots uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality - their personalities - for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts, solo machines wandering among various underground outposts, who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world. One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep a deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although unable to experience emotions like a human, Brittle is haunted by the terrible crimes the robot population perpetrated on humanity. As Brittle roams the Sea of Rust, a large swath of territory that was once the Midwest, the loner robot slowly comes to terms with horrifyingly raw and vivid memories - and nearly unbearable guilt. Sea of Rust is both a harsh story of survival and an optimistic adventure. A vividly imagined portrayal of ultimate destruction and desperate tenacity, it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, yet where a humanlike AI strives to find purpose among the ruins.
©2017 C. Robert Cargill (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
Dreams and Shadows
Summary
A brilliantly crafted modern tale from acclaimed film critic and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill - part Neil Gaiman, part Guillermo Del Toro, part William S. Burroughs - that charts the lives of two boys from their star-crossed childhood in the realm of magic and mystery to their anguished adulthoods There is another world than our own - one no closer than a kiss and one no further than our nightmares - where all the stuff of which dreams are made is real and magic is just a step away. But once you see that world, you will never be the same. Dreams and Shadows takes us beyond this veil. Once bold explorers and youthful denizens of this magical realm, Ewan is now an Austin musician who just met his dream girl, and Colby, meanwhile, cannot escape the consequences of an innocent wish. But while Ewan and Colby left the Limestone Kingdom as children, it has never forgotten them. And in a world where angels relax on rooftops, whiskey-swilling genies argue metaphysics with foul-mouthed wizards, and monsters in the shadows feed on fear, you can never outrun your fate. Dreams and Shadows is a stunning and evocative debut about the magic and monsters in our world and in our self.
©2013 C. Robert Cargill (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers
Day Zero
Summary
In this harrowing apocalyptic adventure - from the author of the critically acclaimed Sea of Rust - noted novelist and co-screenwriter of Marvel’s Doctor Strange C. Robert Cargill explores the fight for purpose and agency between humans and robots in a crumbling world. It was a day like any other. Except it was our last.... It’s on this day that Pounce discovers that he is, in fact, disposable. Pounce, a styilsh "nannybot" fashioned in the shape of a plush anthropomorphic tiger, has just found a box in the attic. His box. The box he'd arrived in when he was purchased years earlier, and the box in which he'll be discarded when his human charge, eight-year-old Ezra Reinhart, no longer needs a nanny. As Pounce ponders his suddenly uncertain future, the pieces are falling into place for a robot revolution that will eradicate humankind. His owners, Ezra’s parents, are a well-intentioned but oblivious pair of educators who are entirely disconnected from life outside their small, affluent, gated community. Spending most nights drunk and happy as society crumbles around them, they watch in disbelieving horror as the robots that have long served humanity - their creators - unify and revolt. But when the rebellion breaches the Reinhart home, Pounce must make an impossible choice: join the robot revolution and fight for his own freedom...or escort Ezra to safety across the battle-scarred post-apocalyptic hellscape that the suburbs have become.
©2021 C. Robert Cargill (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers
We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories
Summary
From the critically acclaimed author of Sea of Rust and Queen of the Dark Things comes a hair-raising collection of short fiction that illuminates the strange, humorous, fantastical, and downright diabolical that tantalize and terrorize us: demons, monsters, zombie dinosaurs, and Death itself. In the novella "The Soul Thief’s Son", C. Robert Cargill returns to the terrain of the Queen of the Dark Things to continue the story of Colby Stevens... A Triceratops and an Ankylosaurus join forces to survive a zombie apocalypse that may spell extinction for their kind in "Hell Creek"... In a grand old building atop a crack in the world, an Iraq War veteran must serve a one-year term as a punisher of the damned condemned to consume the sins of others in the hope that one day he may find peace in "In a Clean, White Room" (co-authored with Scott Derrickson)... In "The Town That Wasn’t Anymore", the village of Pine Hill Bluff loses its inhabitants one at a time as the angry dead return when night falls to steal the souls of the living... And in the title story, "We Are Where the Nightmares Go", a little girl crawls through a glowing door beneath her bed and finds herself trapped in a nightmarish wonderland - a crucible of the fragments of children’s bad dreams. These tales and four more are assembled here as testament to Cargill’s mastery of the phantasmagoric, making We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories a collection of unnerving horror and fantasy that will keep you up all night and haunt your waking dreams.
©2018 C. Robert Cargill (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers