Reviews and Comments

Don’t want to say too much about this one, as it could easily be spoiled. In short, while the science is likely laughable, the story was engaging and a lot of fun. This is a perfect airplane book - entertaining and fast-paced.

It’s quite difficult to say much about this book without spoiling something, so I’ll make this short. The story takes place in a turn-of-the-century insane asylum, the narrator is unreliable, and all of the tropes of gothic literature are well in place all the way up to a mad woman in the attic. It reminded me of Crime and Punishment, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and Whuthering Heights, among many other pieces of classic literature - and in all the right ways.

And the blurbs on the back are right in saying no one is who they seem.

…short stories, this one is a mixed bag. Some grabbed me, and some didn’t. I’d expect that if you read it, we’d pick different stories as our favorite. Many of these stories read like episodes of the original Twilight Zone, and that isn’t a negative critique. Without spoiling, I can say that a couple of the twists were telegraphed, but in one case I felt that it actually improved the story to see the twist coming. Only one story was actually ruined for me by a twist ending, but it was still worth the read as the twist was very sudden. Really, it just tried to tie up the events of a story that was more compelling without big answers.

Really, though, a pretty solid read. Well-written, thought-provoking, and engaging. Reads a bit like if Black Mirror were written by Rod Serling.

With the seas rising, an unnamed area surrounds itself with a barrier wall to keep out both the sea, and the people outside who are barely surviving on boats and rafts. Without spoilers, I’ll say that readers get to see both sides of this wall.

There are so many correlations between the dystopian world of The Wall and today’s world of class division, and fear of ‘the other’. It’s allegory, satire, and warning all in one.

Grim, but fascinating.

Whenever anyone asks me for a recommendation on a book, I give them House of Leaves. As a fan of experimental novels, nervous tension, lingering dread, beautiful and sometimes baffling prose, and reading as a physical experience, this book ticks all my boxes.

I seldom read a book more than once, but I’ve read House of Leaves several times. It’s constructed and printed such that it’s like reading a different book every time. Not a different story, but a different telling of the same story. Reading it the second time was a bit like overhearing the same conversation from the other side of the room, if that makes any sense.

It’s a great book. It’s inventive, challenging, and beautifully terrifying. In movies, they talk about elevated horror. This is an elevated haunted house book in all the right ways.

The way it’s sold in the blurb, I thought this was going to be a classic “patients in charge of the asylum” Grand Guignol story. It was not. There was promise in the first half, though none of the characters were very likable. The second half, and especially the last act, was scattered and uneven, and I lost interest. I finished it, but it’s not going to stick with me.

I was immediately drawn into the bleak world of Wanderers. It reads like The Stand, but with science instead of magic - really, science that appears AS magic. Oddly, it’s the second book I read this year with the same beginning premise of random people mechanically marching for unknown reasons, but Wedig made a lot more of the premise than James Patterson did. Loved the characters, loved the journey, and looking forward to reading the sequel.