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An ancient stone creature threatens the lives of a family on a lonely sheep farm …
I started this when I was but a wee bairn, but for some reason I never finished it, and I've been wondering what happened ever since. What's the point of being an adult in 2024 if you can't fulfil childhood wishes?
Content warning Plot discussion
This was a surprisingly engaging little horror novel, moving smoothly from ghost story to monster to cosmic horror. We have a small cast of characters but primarily we have occasionally functioning drunkard Jay, Tim who is rather more composed as a teenager than I ever was, and Sarah, a precocious little girl, together with their friends and family, who face the typical Thing Man Was Not Meant To Know (about) and attempt to deal with it in a stereotypically American way.
I didn't expect much for a random Kindle book I picked up somewhere (as one does), but I was well satisfied with the experience. I tossed up giving it four stars, but it wasn't quite there.
I got really sick in the middle of reading this -it honestly doesn't take me a month to read a couple of hundred pages.
Vance's world is a dreamy, fin de siècle where the world is ending not with a bang but with a slow and decadent slide. His characters (with a few remarkable exceptions) are horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people, speaking the sort of flowery language that make Fritz Lieber seem like he's writing a Norse saga, but somehow it all works and you're immersed in it.
Few writers could pull off dialogue like
“We go in the mental frame of adventure, aggressiveness, zeal. Thus does fear vanish and the ghosts become creatures of mind-weft; thus does our élan burst the under-earth terror.”
or
"Guyal turned away and they continued down the gallery. Past the real expression of man’s brightest dreamings they walked, until the …
I got really sick in the middle of reading this -it honestly doesn't take me a month to read a couple of hundred pages.
Vance's world is a dreamy, fin de siècle where the world is ending not with a bang but with a slow and decadent slide. His characters (with a few remarkable exceptions) are horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people, speaking the sort of flowery language that make Fritz Lieber seem like he's writing a Norse saga, but somehow it all works and you're immersed in it.
Few writers could pull off dialogue like
“We go in the mental frame of adventure, aggressiveness, zeal. Thus does fear vanish and the ghosts become creatures of mind-weft; thus does our élan burst the under-earth terror.”
or
"Guyal turned away and they continued down the gallery. Past the real expression of man’s brightest dreamings they walked, until the concentration of so much fire and spirit and creativity put them into awe. “What great minds lie in the dust,” said Guyal in a low voice. “What gorgeous souls have vanished into the buried ages; what marvellous creatures are lost past the remotest memory … Nevermore will there be the like; now in the last fleeting moments, humanity festers rich as rotten fruit. Rather than master and overpower our world, our highest aim is to cheat it through sorcery.”
(both from the closing novella, Guyal of Sfere)
completely straight-faced and have it work, but Vance manages it. It's pulpy and funny and cynical and reasonably unlike anything else I know of (though I need to investigate M. John Harrison's The Pastel City which I suspect may have the same energy).
Twice before Thomas Covenant had been summoned to the strange otherworld where magic worked. Twice before he had been forced …
Twice before Thomas Covenant had been summoned to the strange otherworld where magic worked. Twice …
How did I get in a place where Thomas Covenant is a comfort read?
Nancy Kress can be a frustrating author.
She is, perhaps, the best pure storyteller I've ever read, and that holds here, even as her tale twists across multiple times and points of view.
The problem with this book (which I'll say at the start is short and well worth your time) is that she doesn't really have a cohesive story to tell. Too many plot elements resolve to "a wizard did it" which is fundamentally unsatisfying regardless of how well she puts them together. Time travel is a strong spice, and takes a lot of a book's credibility budget - it doesn't leave a lot for possibly benevolent aliens and impossibly accurate predictive models and other magical tech.
Three stars is a little too low, but four would be too many.
Twice before Thomas Covenant had been summoned to the strange otherworld where magic worked. Twice before he had been forced …
Forgot to log the start of this.
Lord Foul's Bane is a fantasy novel by American writer Stephen R. Donaldson, the first …
This is maybe the fourth or fifth time I've read this, but this was the hardest to get through - I couldn't get into it.
Donaldson does have a power and vision, but in 2023 I found his use of words more pretentious than anything (big props for reading this as an ebook to look things up en route), and neither the plot nor the characters engaged me this time around.
I think what I'm mainly missing is being 14 years old reading this on a Sunday afternoon. Next up, I think, is A Short History of Stupid by Helen Razer and Bernard Keane, as a palette cleanser.
Lord Foul's Bane is a fantasy novel by American writer Stephen R. Donaldson, the first …
Well, that was more of a grind than I remember.
Well that was much more of a grind than I remember.
