This teeters at 3.5 but I’m rounding it up because it is pretty unique. Dark fantasy with Fugue states and witches and sex workers in a pretty wild, difficult to explain setting. Mostly because of the soft world building, which is just a preference of mine, I find I much prefer hard world building with settings that depart from “default”. Otherwise you are just rolling with stuff continually, only some of which is explained and deemed important, but all of it impacts your understanding of the world, typically.

Interesting character concepts and setting didn’t quite rescue this from the prose work and premise that manifested to be a bit dull, and the actual characterization. Its just not for me stylistically, which made it hard to get invested. That said, it really is filled with atypical dark fantasy, and a few things do strike a chord. Maybe a book to revisit in the future when I’m in a more amiable mood, but typically in my reading journey I get harder to impress in particular with prose styling and characterization, so I don’t know. Clearly, I’m conflicted.

Three boyhood friends have their lives forever altered when one of them is taken by men posing as cops, and later escapes. Fast forward to adulthood and the beloved daughter of one of the boys, all now long estranged, disappears, dredging up the past.

It’s almost purely character driven novel that works hard to establish what the boys are like initially, and how they transform. And through each, a deep sadness from socio-economic, generational issues is instilled and explored. In this fiction, trauma is predominate and is perceived to petty much colonize the individual. And that perception by others projected onto them eventually makes it real, illustrating a harmful cycle that just continues on and on, forever.

Because it’s so subjective, I’m not sure it’s a “bad” portrayal of trauma creating predators that continue the cycle. But it was pretty deeply uncomfortable focusing on the predation of a character that may have been gay? Yet we never really discover anything like that because he is so traumatized from boyhood events and part of the objective is to show that there is no real truth, since the characters paint him with that brush and so it becomes the truth, anyway. It certainly feeds into the gay predator trope regardless. And implying that the man becomes gay because he was preyed upon as a kid just really dates this pretty highly, in my mind.

Aside from that, however, the writing is quite good and the way in which the author is able to codify the ways the boys emulate and recognize things in their parents and others, forming them into the men they are essentially predestined to become, was pretty phenomenal. I don’t think it rises to literary levels with prose, but they’re certainly above average for commercial fiction as well. I found Shutter Island to be much better in every respect, so this is a bit of a disappointment in comparison, though the mysteries are very, very different.

It was free and read by Ed Harris, and I did read The Cartel by Winslow prior, but didn’t expect a short story romance about a surfer who bums off everyone he knows falling for someone he isn’t sure will react well to him living like a beatnik. It was fine, I guess? Ed Harris is great, the story is forgettable. It is what it is. Had I read the synopsis beforehand I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

I’m not going to rate it because it’s implied in the premise, but the amount of granularity on each film, especially ones I’ve seen, as well as peripheral stuff (which the author spoils the shit out of, P.S), is just not really my thing. I’m all for analyzing the auteur, but I quickly discovered I actually don’t care nearly as much as I thought I did. I have no desire to spend this much time with them. Dnf 50%

I’m really split on this. On one hand, especially in the first quarter of the book, it is extremely low brow commercial fiction, replete with douche bag bad guys who behave badly and that’s how you know they’re bad. It’s melodramatic, maybe unintentionally? Hard to say. Very Live Free or Die Hard vibes, but structured as a much more complex techno-thriller and more protagonists. It’s high-octane and filled with Bond Villain Dialogue too, though. He raced out of the house just before fire “literally” erupted from every window. That kind of stuff.

It does get better, however. As the daemons plan begins to pop off and the intricacies of the plotting become apparent, in tandem with a better-than-average distillation of the technical aspects to what is happening. From MMOs to network security to darkweb stuff, it always felt pretty clear and reasonable we’ll researched; at least, to this laymen. There is the fun omnipresence trope popularized in cyberpunk lit; which, this often seems to be categorized as. I think it’s actually much more a techno thriller than anything else, considering it’s vaguely punk that the daemon targets capital in a kind of anarchism, and the main protagonists are cops and a white hat hacker.

Subsequently, the main antagonists to whatever punk ethos might exist… are the primary narrators. It’s interesting and maybe straddles the line of a present day cyberpunk classification. The main issue, for me, is that while it targets corporations and plays the game or capitalism to do so, it’s not actually interested in portraying the values, just using them as factions waging a war. There’s no voice for the marginalized and it’s too busy describing the ways in which technology is being weaponized in one way or another against each side, it actually doesn’t feel about socio economic circumstances.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty fun (when it isn’t dropping lines that make my eyes roll back into my head, especially when they’re in MMOs), but it the intelligence of the work, imo, is found in the competency with technology and the plotting, and the swapping around of protagonists. Otherwise it may as well be Dean Koontz or James Patterson, David Baldacchi,etc., just with this very particular niche.

3.5 rounded up (for the moment)

I never clicked with the voice in this story and as it went on I found it more and more grating. Months later now all I remember is that had I not been reading it for the Booktube prize, I would have DNF'd it. Even though it is undeniably, I think, well written. The characterization and prose just did not hook me.

This book was pretty disappointing, but only because it was completely enthralling at the start, chronologically chronicling the life of Thomas Man. I found the first, maybe third, really gripping and a five-star read. But then, time becomes quite malleable and the prose that made a lot of sense for a young adult character begins to immediately feel antiquated and you realize that is just the overall voice crafted for the novel.

The access we have to the character, even though it is fiction, feels really strange, as well. It is respectful... but also feels immensely obfuscation. It feels on rails, never deviating from exactly what is well known from the source while treating the subject far too nicely, and that broke the suspense of disbelief I had. The agenda is far too apparent and the time jumps serve to break the investment in the linear progress I was enjoying.

The queer longing is handled well. As is the relationship between the fiction being crafted and the author's life, but because my suspension of disbelief was broken, it all just felt like I couldn't trust the non-line-in-the-sand-being drawn. It's a really odd framing, in my opinion. But it seems to have worked for most people.

I adored the prose work in this, and the premise--where a daughter is brought to a private in-group with her father, who is a salesman and uses her to, essentially, con people out of there more--was really interesting from the child's perspective. But it then ends really abruptly and with a thud. I didn't need catharsis, but it also felt like a stop-gap. I wasn't sure what the author was trying to accomplish with the ending, but I didn't get it, I guess.

It is very, very fast. Pages were sized to my iPhone and flew by. I wonder if that experience, which I not used to, detracted from my overall expectations because the slider constantly showed the percentage and the layout made it so that the chapters were about a page, if that. It was a strange experience.

I did round it up because I did like it overall, and think about it months later.

I loved the prose work, the setting, and the concepts of the characters. It is viscerally rendered. It is brutal but it makes sense for the story and themes. It does, however, even with a small page count, become far too cyclical. It feels like the same plot beats and a very predictable plot and, though fitting, also a foregone conclusion for the finale.

3.5 rounded up, barely. On the fence.

I didn't like anything much about this, and on top of that, I saw a reviewer discussing how the translation was so vastly different from the original in a fairly large portion, that I just felt like I could not trust anything about the novel.