Sax Russel finished reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To the corporate owners of 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 …
