Surprisingly pragmatic and helpful advice on feeding your creativity as though it were some kind of entity or creature requiring a social contract. An interesting outlook that doesn’t boil down to just keep plugging away. Or if writing is what you want to do, quit your job and take it seriously. I like this outlook. Where you form an arrangement with yourself that isn’t self destructive or puts too much pressure on you. Interesting stuff.

This is a weird one for me because the story didn’t do much for me, though it was well written and features some lyrical and evocative prose. I also listened to the audiobook, which had the author narrating it, and that guy did a fantastic job. It made the fiction atmospheric and the cadence was fantastic. It would easily be a 4 star for me but I found I was more interested in the descriptions than what the characters were up to.

Having designed and written the game, as with all my work, I think it's pretty good!

It's good stuff. Can't wait for people to get their mitts on it.

Is good, I think, no?

It’s a pretty solid down the rabbit hole of the occult via a police officer that witnesses something horrific and uncanny. I don’t think there’s anything here that’ll blow your mind if you’ve read something like this before, but the plot is fresh enough to combat the overused framework.

Have you seen Fallen or read The Dresden Files? You’ll even passingly next familiar with the story. It does have a few sidewinders that differentiate it, such as jumping between past and present. In the past, a black FBI officer investigated strange things happening, in the future a woman investigates something, and the two converge.

The plot clips along nicely, the characters are pretty engaging, though sometimes it feels like the authors can’t decide if they’re going for commercial fiction or not, in terms of structure and prose. I’m not sure if it’s handling of racial issues as a white man in Canada, but it seems to already have led to polarizing reviews. One of the investigations is a white man who has been lynched. The intent is a kind of sick perversion but whether or not it’s serviceable you the aims of the story is debatable.

That being said. I found it to be fun and satisfying. It won’t blow you away but it’s not meant to. This is a setup for a series as well. So if you haven’t read or watched movies like this before it might be more substantial and you might get more investment, for which you’ll be rewarded in the future, presumably.

Shout out to NetGalley for the advanced copy. Love that they have audiobooks now. And by the way, the narration for the audiobook is fantastic.

Interesting concept. It succeeds at incapsulating a complex snapshot of being a cis white male in Western culture via jumping around into various characters at various points in their lives, giving more context than I would say is typical for toxic masculinity.

The problem I had with it was that it became very hard to connect with each character as it jumps around. While there are a few stand out moments, I never really grew to be more than a third party observer of these various people and events. And the prose style actually doesn’t help much with that problem. Sometimes it is intimate, sometimes meandering, always feeling a bit transient.

The overall feeling I’m left with is that it does what it aims to do but isn’t quite cohesive enough beyond the goal to have exceeded my expectations. Was worth a read though. Especially if you’re a white cis male, I think the more books approaching toxic masculinity, the better.