Nate
Like a lot of the other reviews of this one, I felt that it was severely in need of some strict editing. I really respect the fact that Dinniman plotted out such an intricate puzzlebox floor with every foreground and background piece's placements and movements meticulously tracked and detailed, and I can appreciate and understand the desire to include all that background work in the narrative proper. But for me? I really wish most of it was left on the cutting room floor. It felt way too procedural, lots of repetitive overwhelming details that ended up making a big chunk of this a slog to get through.
The actual story beats though? Holy shit. So goddamn good. The climax at the midpoint had me fucking PUMPED. I feel like the stakes were pretty low for most of this one, but when they ramp up, they fucking RAMP UP.
I absolutely love Katia (her spotlight moment is the series highlight so far), Donut is still the fucking best, and I can't wait to see more of creepy screaming sociopath goatman.
I gotta squeeze some other books in before I read the next one because at this rate I'm gonna be caught up way too soon.
An absolutely perfect book. Would make a great movie. Tightly paced, well written and VERY SPOOKY.
Was reading this book before bed and around midnight I had to sneak off to the bathroom and I found myself hurrying and jumping at shadows and feeling all sorts of spookified, and that is super rare. This book really got under my skin. I loved it so much.
It doesn't hurt that analog horror bildungsroman might be the perfect genre for me.
Suffers a bit from middle book syndrome but is still a really solid read.
While I love the heavy handed way Dinniman fosters consistent interest and narrative drive through big plot twists and dramatic cliff-hangers, one thing I've noticed more throughout this entry is the more gentle handed, subtle approach he uses for character development and dramatic elements. It's a really well coordinated two-pronged attack that works incredibly well. The pathos is surprisingly effective and grounded for what is ostensibly outrageous and ridiculous and for me that's the quintessential core element of what makes this series work for me as well as it does.
I fucking inhaled this book. Complete popcorn novel.
Not quite as good as Kaiju:BS, but that's probably because that was a complete story and this one ends with a cliffhanger that propels you directly into the sequel.. if you can even call it a sequel, more like each book is an arc of a massive webnovel. Speaking of webnovels, I haven't gotten this thoroughly hooked on a book since Worm. Finished this first book in under a week and am already 20% through the next.
Really really charming. Fun and refreshing and goofy and weird and just a really pleasant experience. I read so many self-serious meaningful novels that I almost forgot how quickly and completely I can be immersed in something so straightforward and addictive.
Significantly better than the first one and should be an easy 4 stars except for one huge gross plot point in the middle that I really really hated and made me detract a star. Where the first one was a kinda charming 2.5 with enough intriguing things going for it it got bumped to a 3, this one's a kinda disappointing 3.5+ with big enough flaws to drop it down to a 3.
This series is clearly inspired by Conan/Howard and other classic pulp sword & sandals and very clearly an inspiration for tons of modern things, included but not limited to, Game of Thrones, Scott Hawkins' Library at Mount Char, and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
It makes me sad that this series at least so far doesn't even approach the greatness of those that came before or after.
That isn't to say I don't like it. It's just disappointing. It's the kind of series that should really thrive on either the strength of the characters, the world building, or the writing, but all of these are so mediocre.
I did like the mentor-Corwyn in this a lot more than goofy revenge-Corwyn in book 1 (until he ruined it in the most gross 1970s man way possible :/).
I also really really liked a segment in the middle where Zelazny actually put some effort into his craft and threw out some super gorgeous prose-work.
Also a section near the end had a really dope sword fight in a sapling forest with some badass imagery that I'm gonna remember for awhile.
I'm probably gonna end up finishing this series unless it somehow gets worse, they're short quick pulpy reads and I'm a lot more invested than I sound, but I feel like they could be so much more and have left me ultimately disappointed :(.
Paradoxically both too long and too short. Way too short to give any of the characters the gravity their melodramatic deaths seem to want to evoke. But simultaneously written in an overlong repetitive style that made the entire thing drag.
That's 2 books in a row this year (this and The Shining) that I read because I absolutely fucking love the movie and heard the book was even better and ended up being super disappointed. Insanely rare that this happens to me :(.
I'm having bad luck with books this year. So many 2-3 stars :(.
Ugh. I really really wanted to like this book, but it was a SLOG to get through. After being catapulted through a fantastic first third-ish, I tried to ride that momentum to the end, but it petered out hard.
Three things ruined this book for me more than anything else.
First off, the writing style/length. Holy shit this dude is verbose in the most useless way possible. It was padded out like a bad highschool essay. At least a third of this novel should have been left on the cutting room floor.
If you're going to describe literally every place and room and character down to the shoes on their feet and the texture of the floor, at least do some fucking environmental storytelling with it.
You don't need to tell me about every single character's red/brown/black coat/jacket/sweater with holes/dirt/tears. Tell me what they do differently. How they're surviving. Tell me about the orphan trying to hide two golden rings on a chain under his shirt. Tell me about the old man with prison tattoo style tally marks on his face. Tell me about anything that could be remotely interesting about these people that I can care about.
Same with the corpses that are literally everywhere and used as lazy grimdark set dressing. Just telling me there're bodies everywhere gets repetitive and boring real fast. Give me something interesting to grab onto. Show me a family in a bedroom and empty pill bottles. Show me cars at the bottom of ravines. Show me remains that tell me something about these people in their final moments, protection/betrayal/love/fear/regret/ANYTHING. Instead it's just spooky skeletons everywhere, no humans anywhere.
Also UGH sometime after around the halfway point, the prose slips into this weird hokey colloquial corny ass country voice for the rest of the book?
Secondly, and this one is kinda nitpicky, but there's a shitload of fridge logic in this book. Fridge logic works in a two hour movie because I don't really have time to do the math on how much food you'd need to find to feed an army of thousands for seven years in a post apocalyptic scavenger society. But in a thousand page book?? I'm constantly taken out of it by the absolute nonsensical shit that is just glossed over. No one's refining gas, but they have barrels and barrels of usable gasoline after seven years? It's raining and muddy all the time but somehow people are still finding cardboard boxes to sleep in?
Even worse, we're introduced to a group of orphans after the seven year time skip, who have been living alone for the most part the entire time. They're all 10-17ish, so they were 3-10ish when the bombs dropped. They all speak better English, and besides the fact that they're kinda dirty, are way smarter and more civilized than I was at that age. You'd expect some kind of unique culture to emerge right? Some unique traditions or slang or behaviors/fears/traumas? Nah. McCammon is more interested in telling you that the cave walls are slightly damp and shiny and that the room is warm and smells like stale gunpowder and farts.
Finally, I REALLY wish someone would have told me that this novel is basically Christian prosperity doctrine fanfiction. The core philosophy of this book is repulsive and implies some shitty beliefs.
The Good characters are all born Good. Goodness is an intrinsic quality and Good characters are surrounded by Good people, they do Good things and Good things happen to them. They don't have to make any difficult decisions because the Right path is always clear. There's always a heroic option for them to take and they take it without any second thoughts because they were divinely chosen and have magic powers and this is their destiny and they are Good and Righteous and blah blah blah
The Evil characters are all intrinsically Evil, etc etc etc.
No fucking nuance, no depth, no challenge, no growth. People are what they were born to be and nothing else.
It's a survivalist wasteland, but only the evil characters have to make any difficult choices. Why do they have to compromise their morals to survive? Because they were born evil and deserve to be punished, obviously.
I have more to say, but this is getting way too long and I think I might be ranting at this point.
First third of this book, up to the bombs dropping? 5/5. Everything up to the timeskip? ~3.5/5. Everything after? 1/5 at best.
Epic prank bro!
Super fun, weird as fuck, constantly surprising and entertaining as hell. No one does it the way SGJ does.
Whenever I read one of his books I'm always reminded of this quote from an interview with him, “[...]So the deal I made with myself was: you can go to grad school, but you have to be in ninja mode. Go in and steal the good craft and smuggle it back out to science fiction and western and horror.[...]”. He brings big MFA energy to pulpy horror and I fucking love him for it.
5/5 worldbuilding and imagery. I love the setting so much. Gothic sci-fi western? Yes please. So fucking cool.
1/5 characters and prose. Especially the male gaze-y fawning zero agency female characters. Ugh. Gross. Incredibly bad writing too :(.
I'll probably read more of the series. It's fun and light. Maybe some of the later books are better.
So incredibly good omg.
Reminds me a lot of BR Yeager's Amygdalatropolis I read a few weeks back. Both deal with truth in an internet world through a verisimilitudenous (is that a word?) epistolary framework.
Where Amygdalatropolis deals with a subculture I'm at least tangentially knowledgeable about, The Sluts exists in a realm I know nothing about (which might make sense of why I'm such a big fan of these gay focused transgressive horror novels?)
I fucking loved it. This is my second Dennis Cooper and definitely not my last.
I really really wanted to give this one 5 stars. It's an absolute page turner with tons of fun twists and turns.
Some of the plot points and events near the end felt super convenient and contrived, the climax was weirdly problematic and unsatisfying, and all the stuff involving one of the characters felt a lot more mean spirited and real-world hateful than necessary.
I'm surprised this book has never been adapted, it'd make a great miniseries.
There is a lot to love and a lot of brilliance in this book. From meditations on the slow sadness of entropy and the pain of distance (temporal, relational, and geographical) to the masterful use of stacking themes (memories and videotapes and generational PoVs) to the unfalteringly gorgeous prose (no one can in good conscience say the John Darnielle/The Mountain Goats aren't poetic geniuses), but the whole thing rang pretty hollow to me. I get what he was trying for and think it's an amazing attempt at real art, but he kinda lost the thread in making it a good book first. I really wanted to like it more than I actually did. It's got me more than interested in reading his other stuff though.
This one didn't work for me at all. I really should've just dropped it near the beginning. The writing style grates. (Most of) the characters are completely flat. The police procedural style parts are flat out BAD, like the corniest and blandest episode of SVU you could think of.
It had a few great moments that pushed me through, maybe 3 or 4 total? I kept thinking it had to get better, if she could write something as clever and interesting as the scene where the jaded detective/gen-x mom has to have her underage daughter turn off the parental locks on her laptop so she could google crime scene pictures, she MUST be able to keep my interest when the plot threads all start to come together and the tension is at maximum right? Nah :/
Doesn't help that it's written in this style that feels like an old gen-x'er trying to speak like a zoomer. The internet and cultural references are painful. Plus some super unfortunate use of AAVE and a couple of weirdly uncomfortable n-bombs.
I have no idea who this book is for. Do not recommend.
Easy one sitting read. Would love to see a stage production of it.
Genuinely creepy at times. The ebb and flow of the tension is perfect. Things escalate, almost coming to a head, before someone diffuses it with a fun/strange/light-hearted/tangential observation/joke/non-sequitur and things circle around before personalities clash again. We circle this drain from all these different directions, watching the id of this cast of multi-dimensional characters boil over until everything implodes. It's great.
Dialogue is what Max does best and he straight up murders it here. Believable, witty, punchy dialogue is the core of everything he does, and really what elevates him as a writer.
It does feel a bit thin though. Like this should be the middle third of a bigger piece of work. Or the title piece in a collection of stories that all examine this techno-horror character-study theme from different angles.
Either way. Super worth the read. Wish he'd learn to write prose (or team up with someone skilled at it (S. Craig Zahler and Landis would be my fucking dream collab)) and write a novel already.
Probably more like a 3? 3.5? The first half was super solid. The interstitials were perfect. The prose was top tier and what really drove me to the end. The part with the turtle is the best (worst?) part of the book. Loved it.
Very very VERY predictable though. After the initial shock wears off and the meat of the story gets going in full force it all plays out exactly how you would imagine.
Easy read though, drags near the end, especially after you realize that yes, it is just going through the motions now and is done doing anything novel.
Terrific prose. As a story-teller you can definitely find better, but on the level of pure word-craft? Maybe one of the best in the field.
I love Grady Hendrix so fucking much. This one might even be better than ‘My Best Friend's Exorcism'? I can't decide.
Either way, I absolutely loved this book. Grady Hendrix isn't so much an artist as an entertainer. His prose isn't anything special and there aren't any deeper hidden meanings behind his stories. Everything is right there, right out in the open, what you see is what you get. It's sincere as fuck and super charming.
He writes believable loveable characters. His callbacks are always perfectly timed and get me all choked up. His books always build to these rampant page-turning climaxes that leave me absolutely floored.
I love allegory and satire and digging for meaning and art and being draped in elegant prose, but sometimes I just want to read something fun. Grady's books are the perfect novels for making you remember how much straight up fucking FUN reading can be.
Man. This book did not work for me at all.
There are 4(ish) things that I look for in books, and if even just one of them is well done I'll be happy.
Interesting character arcs - None. Control doesn't grow or change or do anything besides putz around and have things happen to him for 350 pages
Story - Just backstory for the next book? As soon as this book finally goes somewhere it ends on a cliffhanger for the next. No resolution, nothing. Wtf?
Plot - NOTHING HAPPENS. Control goes to the place. People are weird at him. He doesn't react. The end
Prose - WEAK ASS PASSIVE PROSE. It worked in Annihilation because the prose was in service to the character. The Biologist was distant and kinda weird, so distant detached kinda weird prose works. Control is supposed to be a cool spy-guy or whatever. Why is the prose still this weird wishy-washy passive voice nonsense??
Ugh. I hated this book.
Lets hope the third's better.
Grady Hendrix's is the next Stephen King.
His prose is clean and serviceable, nothing fancy, nothing deep, and his worldbuilding falls apart if you stare at it a little too hard, but jesus fucking christ can this man write a page-turner. His books are absurdly well paced, his plotting is tight and immaculate and his character arcs are phenomenal.
It's so hard for me to start one of his books and not immediately devour the entire thing (I'm already halfway through We Sold Our Souls just 2 days after finishing this...).
He's not high literature, but he's top tier entertainment. I hope he continues at this pace for the next 40 years.