The Electric Church

The setting was awesome, the characters well fleshed out. The plot very promising, but the ending ruined it all.

A gritty futuristic world where people are secretly being abducted against their will and having their brains transplanted into artificial bodies, becoming religious nuts in the process. The protagonist is a hard ass gun for hire that has been set up to kill a cop, and now is being hunted down by the police. And in this decayed and corrupt future, they are not very nice people.

There is gun fighting, some psychic powers, and a basic “heist” plot, where a team of misfits must pull out an impossible feat. The details of how they execute it are not very clever, it is not the book's strongest feature. But the ending, definitely ruined it all.

At some point, fighting one indestructible cyborgs with superior fire power, greatly improved reflexes and strength is nearly impossible. by the end of the book, they infiltrate they home base with thousands of them, and destroy them by the dozen like it's nothing.

The author set up an impossible situation, and he failed to deliver a satisfactory solution.

Good fast writing, ok setup and background, (too) shallow plot. Would have worked much better as a graphic novel.

I should start off by saying that I don't think this is a novel with mass appeal. You would definitely have to already be a science fiction fan to enjoy it, I think, and even within that subset of readers only certain fans would grok to the style that Somers uses throughout.

The novel begins in a 70s-style dystopian future - the type one would have seen in Logan's Run or Soylent Green. In that environment we meet Avery Cates, a stereotypical antihero who will kill anyone if the price is right. He's given a big job - to take down the head of The Electric Church, a religious group that sucks the brains out of people's heads and puts them in mechanical bodies. As Avery recently saw a friend of his go through this procedure involuntarily, he's more than willing to take the job, especially as it promises to make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Avery assembles a team and eventually infiltrates the church. In doing so he comes to see that while being a rich asshole in a broken society might sound better than being a poor asshole in a broken society, that ‘broken society' thing remains a problem, especially when he realizes just how broken it is. By the end of the book he's still an asshole, but he's started on the path to becoming a revolutionary.

And that's where the book hit me - when I realised that it's central moral conundrum was that once you've gotten to that point where the boot is stomping on the face of humanity forever, the only way to get out from under it is to place your trust in an amoral monster. Who is exactly the last person you want in a position of power once it's time to try and rebuild. It will be really interesting to see how this develops through the rest of the series.

I had entered to win this book through the giveaways on a bit of an impulse. The premise sounded interesting, though once I had won the book I want back through reviews and started to regret it.

I'm not one for action, I prefer things to be a little more intellectual, and the descriptions of action, gun fights, etc had turned me off. I'm glad I had waited to read the reviews until after I had won the book.

Sitting solidly in the cyberpunk/dystopian sub genres there is action and there are gun fights, but it is far from the core of the story. Things do move a little slowly at the start, but given this if the first book in a series, it is to be expected.

The world is interesting and grows on you as the story moves on. The same can also be said of the main character. My only real complaint is the frequency in which the main character states how tough and hard assed he needs to be in order to survive in the world. It breaks the rule of showing instead of telling and becomes a little too repetitious.

The last third of the book was quite gripping and overall I found I was enjoying myself. It ends in such a way that I'm very curious as to what is going to happen next. I will likely pickup the rest of the books in the series so I can satisfy that curiosity.

Set in the future, this is the story of Avery Cates who is not exactly a model citizen. In fact, if he had things his way, he would see the entirety of “society” and corrupt world government toppled. However, when he is approached by a man who wishes to hire him to assassinate the head of the Electric Church, he is going to need a helping hand from both government agents and the seedy underworld as well.

A post-cyberpunk book with heavy dystopian leanings. While I couldn't give it five stars, I did liked it. It lost a star because I felt it was a bit depressing and not always as compelling as I wished it had been. However, it did have several fine twists and will be checking out more of Jeff Somers work.