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Jan. 7th, 2011 10:16 pmToday I keep doing daft things. I've decided to redeem myself by telling you about the first of the new crop of Angry Robot books. It was released yesterday in the UK and I finished reading it way early in the week and feel rather guilty I haven't blogged it. I possibly shouldn't've got that virus?
The novel is by J Robert King and is called Death's Disciples. It's very hard to describe without giving stuff away. I'm tempted to try, because even if I give you key plot points, they'll twist in on themselves. Except it's a rude thing to do and I'm in a polite mood tonight.
What *can* I tell you about Death's Disciples? The thing that fascinates me the most is the way King plays with narrative conventions. This is something that's true of most of the Angry Robot books - they don't simply lift tropes and re-express them. King sets the whole story up as kind of a half-way house between a standard thriller and Lost. Someone survives a plane disaster who should not. Just one person. And the consequences are potentially very nasty.
What's interesting about King's book is that it has many of the hallmarks of a thriller, and quite a few of dark horror and yet, somehow, King makes me care about characters. This is not normal for me. Thrillers are not my reading of choice most of the time, mostly because the characters in thrillers are so often subsumed to the plot. I lost that caring partway through, but there were reasons for that, too.
Death's Disciples isn't as tight as King's Angel of Death. This is both good (heroes and heroines take longer to emerge, the ending isn't as cut and dried) and not so good (I didn't enjoy the last hundred pages nearly as much as I enjoyed the first two hundred or so).
It's not a pleasant book (it's dark horror - of course it's not pleasant) but I cared to see what happened and didn't switch off until well, I can't tell you why I switched off because it's plot related. King made a choice that made it hard to follow a thread the whole way through the novel and the thread I was following was the one of the ones that helped me enjoy the novel. It was clever, and fans of that kind of apocalyptic horror will love it. For me, however, the personal counts very highly, and he lost me.
I loved the initial premise. Sleeping beauty wakes up with an attitude, but no memory. She also wakes up with the ability to talk to every single person who died on the plane she was on. The dual mystery that spins out from that is how she escaped that bomb and who wants her dead.
I also loved lots of the dialogue. There was a casual snark and occasional racism and bigotry contained in the dialogue. Not a lot, just enough to tell us a bunch about the characters and and their world. It meant that the novel was about more than fear. That element of the dialogue helped hold the thread to the characters and kept me interested in them for so long. It was when that dialogue was overwhelmed by events that I paused.
Overall, I found it twisty, very, very dark and a solid read. Not my favourite Angry Robot book, but still enjoyable.
The novel is by J Robert King and is called Death's Disciples. It's very hard to describe without giving stuff away. I'm tempted to try, because even if I give you key plot points, they'll twist in on themselves. Except it's a rude thing to do and I'm in a polite mood tonight.
What *can* I tell you about Death's Disciples? The thing that fascinates me the most is the way King plays with narrative conventions. This is something that's true of most of the Angry Robot books - they don't simply lift tropes and re-express them. King sets the whole story up as kind of a half-way house between a standard thriller and Lost. Someone survives a plane disaster who should not. Just one person. And the consequences are potentially very nasty.
What's interesting about King's book is that it has many of the hallmarks of a thriller, and quite a few of dark horror and yet, somehow, King makes me care about characters. This is not normal for me. Thrillers are not my reading of choice most of the time, mostly because the characters in thrillers are so often subsumed to the plot. I lost that caring partway through, but there were reasons for that, too.
Death's Disciples isn't as tight as King's Angel of Death. This is both good (heroes and heroines take longer to emerge, the ending isn't as cut and dried) and not so good (I didn't enjoy the last hundred pages nearly as much as I enjoyed the first two hundred or so).
It's not a pleasant book (it's dark horror - of course it's not pleasant) but I cared to see what happened and didn't switch off until well, I can't tell you why I switched off because it's plot related. King made a choice that made it hard to follow a thread the whole way through the novel and the thread I was following was the one of the ones that helped me enjoy the novel. It was clever, and fans of that kind of apocalyptic horror will love it. For me, however, the personal counts very highly, and he lost me.
I loved the initial premise. Sleeping beauty wakes up with an attitude, but no memory. She also wakes up with the ability to talk to every single person who died on the plane she was on. The dual mystery that spins out from that is how she escaped that bomb and who wants her dead.
I also loved lots of the dialogue. There was a casual snark and occasional racism and bigotry contained in the dialogue. Not a lot, just enough to tell us a bunch about the characters and and their world. It meant that the novel was about more than fear. That element of the dialogue helped hold the thread to the characters and kept me interested in them for so long. It was when that dialogue was overwhelmed by events that I paused.
Overall, I found it twisty, very, very dark and a solid read. Not my favourite Angry Robot book, but still enjoyable.