The Dead Lands

I really enjoyed Percy's werewolf book, Red Moon, so I was keen to get into this one as soon as I could. Sadly, it turned out to be not as good as that book. There is some great vivid writing, very atmospheric and evocative, but two flaws pull it down. Firstly, the bad guys are just too bad - cartoon villains with no depth or believability. Percy also adopts a deliberately fragmented style, with key events happening between chapters or even sentences, leading me to repeatedly go back over what I'd just read to see if I'd missed something, which I normally hadn't. I suppose it's a device to reinforce the idea of a broken world, but it quickly became distracting. Overall, an enjoyable read, but could have been much better.

This went from one of my most anticipated reads of the summer to what will surely be one of the summer's biggest disappoints. The novel mixes post-apocalyptic dystopian realism with what I guess would be considered aspects of weird fiction, and although I normally love mixing and blending of genres, it doesn't work for me here. All of the weird stuff (telekinesis, controlling animals, bat boys) is all explained away by the presence of radiation which contributes to accelerated evolution. And that explantion gets repeated so often throughout the novel (or at least to me it seemed to) that it begins sounding more like an excuse.

The novel also makes use of multiple-perspective, which, again, I generally enjoy. But sometimes the perspective changes mid-chapter, which bothered me. I know that multiple-perspectives doesn't always have to work in the one narrator to a chapter model of Game of Thrones or Faulkner, but I got frustrated by the perspectives shifting without the closure of the ending of a chapter. And since the narrative perspectives often lack closure, the books seems to drag, as if we're slowly plodding along from St. Louis to Oregon with the characters. I know Benjamin Percy is a good writer. I've enjoyed his writing in the past. But I'm just not feeling it with this one.

This went from one of my most anticipated reads of the summer to what will surely be one of the summer's biggest disappoints. The novel mixes post-apocalyptic dystopian realism with what I guess would be considered aspects of weird fiction, and although I normally love mixing and blending of genres, it doesn't work for me here. All of the weird stuff (telekinesis, controlling animals, bat boys) is all explained away by the presence of radiation which contributes to accelerated evolution. And that explantion gets repeated so often throughout the novel (or at least to me it seemed to) that it begins sounding more like an excuse.

The novel also makes use of multiple-perspective, which, again, I generally enjoy. But sometimes the perspective changes mid-chapter, which bothered me. I know that multiple-perspectives doesn't always have to work in the one narrator to a chapter model of Game of Thrones or Faulkner, but I got frustrated by the perspectives shifting without the closure of the ending of a chapter. And since the narrative perspectives often lack closure, the books seems to drag, as if we're slowly plodding along from St. Louis to Oregon with the characters. I know Benjamin Percy is a good writer. I've enjoyed his writing in the past. But I'm just not feeling it with this one.