Tag Archives: dystopian

Towers

Book Review of Towers, by Matthew Bryant

Leave a reply

TowersAuthor, Matthew Bryant, sent me an ecopy of his novel, Towers. (I’ve also seen it on the KDP free list.)

Description from Goodreads:
The next job, the next fix, the next thrill has been the mindset of Heath Fallows since the day he abandoned his broken home for the harsher call of the streets. But being a homeless thief in a conglomerate society will only get you so far, and he soon finds himself surviving by skirting outside of business infrastructure. 

A career of breaking and entering and drug-peddling is brought to a screeching halt when a successful job leads to being chased down by a supernatural entity and left for dead. 

Working outside of his traditional networks, Heath is forced to dig deeper into the underbelly of society, locked closets of high culture, and the deadly unknown beyond the district boundaries to uncover what he overlooked and the truth behind the towers of corporate dominance.

Review:
I don’t often use star ratings here, but I think, in this case, it will help me make a point about how I feel. I’m really torn between a three-star and a four-star (out of five). Certainly, the writing is good enough to qualify for a four-star rating, with few editing mishaps to detract from what is just a wonderful use of language to tell a story. However, that story is somewhat on the vague side.

It’s action-packed. What feels like a good 80% of the book is dedicated running, fighting, blowing things us, etc. In all honesty, it got old. I needed something to break it up, even as well-written as it was. But all that action leaves little time for figuring out what is going on. Even as I reached the end, I was still wondering what exactly was happening and why exactly the main character took the particular, extreme actions he did. It’s not that his actions didn’t make sense, given that someone was trying to kill him, it just that there was so little time dedicated to exploring the situation that it felt like he leapt from one baseless decision to the next.

The book is a strange blend of cyber/techno-thriller and Mad Max-style dystopia. It made for an interesting world. However, that world, while described well, isn’t well developed. I was left with a lot of questions about it, like, for example, what the ‘ancients’ actually are. I did appreciate its harsh grittiness and some of the gender perverting that happened around the Barron Junkers, but as with everything else, I felt cheated of the details.

All in all, this is a true 3.5. Giving it a three feels like I’d cheat it of well-earned praise, but a four feels like an inflated score. *sigh*

Tin

Book Review of Tin (Tin #1), by Parker Zane

Leave a reply

TinI downloaded a copy of Tin, by Parker Zane, while it was free on Amazon.

Description from Goodreads:
Tin, Dead End District was a forgotten freckle of a town in the Southwestern desert of Old America. Erected after the ’63 meteor showers that decimated the world as we knew it, Tin had only known sandstorms, drought, sweltering heat, lack of technology and fear. And until 2095, Sakura Blue had only known Tin. 

With her parents murdered, and her giraffe ranch faltering, Sakura lived by Tin’s motto. Keep your head down, tail tucked and taxes paid. Until the life of her precious sister, Fuyuko is on the line. Now Sakura has a new motto. Who can I trust, and who will end up dead? 

Review:
I love the cover. The writing here was fine and the dystopian future seemed interesting. I even liked some aspects of the characters. Sakura had a pleasantly Machiavellian attitude toward using people that I appreciated. Finn was honorable and I loved his little tick. The wolf was the villain with a wounded heart. All things I like in a book.

Unfortunately, the book had a lot more that I don’t. First and foremost, I finished it wondering what the point had been. Yes, the sister was found, but a whole lot of something was set up and never followed through with. Most importantly, whatever it is about Sakura that makes the narrator want to tell her story 40 or so years later. Nothing of historical note happens here.

Second, the blurb makes Sakura sound like she’s going to be a bad ass. Instead she flails about helplessly basically deciding which man to attach herself to for the best results.

Third, while there was a pleasant cultural mix here it started to feel like variety was added just for varieties sake. People raise giraffe and zebra, instead of horses and cattle. Women wear saris, kimonos and obis instead of skirts, dresses or belts (not to mention pants). The food is all Indian and the villain Kenyan. Despite being set in a dystopian America there is almost nothing distinctly American left and it felt cluttered and artificial.

Lastly, for a rather short book that never manages to find its way to the point, it spends an awful lot of time on the cliché rich man beautifies a woman shtick. What’s worse, the cross dressing fashion designer queen with an attitude couldn’t have been more stereotypical if Zane had tried for it.

I was disappointed in this. Zane has some apparent talent, but the book left me wanting in a lot of ways.

Book Review of An Eye For An Eye For An Eye, by Marc Nash

Leave a reply

An eye for an eye for an eyeAuthor, Marc Nash sent me a copy of his novel An Eye For An Eye For An Eye.

Description from Goodreads:
You can tell a lot about a society from its murders. And Simon Moralee can tell everything from its victims. He has the gift- or is it a curse?- of being able to recover a vision of the last thing murder victims had imprinted on their minds before death. It means he can identify their killers and describe them to the police to secure a one hundred percent clean-up rate. A gift he first discovered as a teenager when cradling his butchered mother in his arms.
His financially bankrupt society leaps at the opportunity his gift provides, by cutting the level of policing and detection back to the bone, as a yet another cost-saving measure. The few remaining policemen serve as Simon’s minders as they seek to protect their most valuable asset and the one remaining celebrity the State can promote to their citizens as a good news story. Only people are losing interest in his exploits, as they lose hope for their society with its murder rate spiralling beyond Simon’s ability to keep pace. And into this numbers game emerges a new threat, when a criminal mastermind with a psychic power of his own, challenges Simon in a psychological joust to the death…

Review:
You know how people sometimes gripe that there are rarely any surprises at the end of books, as the good guys are guaranteed to win one way or another? “Why can’t the baddy win every now and again?” They might ask. Well, here is the book for them. It’s not strictly that a person on the evil side of the protagonist/antagonist divide wins, so much as a delicious twist on winning at all. Look for no happily ever afters here.

To be sure this is a dense read though. I generally enjoy the occasional ten dollar word, but they are the norm rather than the endearing exception here, making the book feel like an obscure work by some long dead classicist Russian or, gawd forbid, Italian. Obtuse. I spent a lot of time rereading overly wordy, syllable heavy passages of ethereal prose. It wasn’t quite purple, but it held that same uselessly accessorised feel to it. In the end, it just felt pretentious and pompous, as if Nash was puffing it up for ego’s sake.

Now, don’t get me wholly wrong. The style annoyed the ever-living crap out of me, but it was smart writing. The vocabulary was definitely well above the average, the ideas being imparted were thoroughly thought out and it was all mechanically and editorially without fault. (Or at least I noticed very few errors.) So, pending you can get past the self-important writing style, a good story awaits.

I did have trouble with the disassociated detached observer narrator. To me all of the narrative about the social situations and such felt like it should be coming from Simon, which meant anytime that that same narrative then turned its external eye on him, referring to him in the 3rd person, I was jarred. It just felt wrong to me.

I also found it inconsistent. Sometimes functioning as an omnipotent observer, other-times being denied knowledge of people’s thoughts or motives. Again, I found these moments pulled me from the story.

Final say? A really interesting dystopian setting (I might even call it post apocalyptic, if you’re willing to credit economic collapse with ending civilisation.), thought provoking characters and a appropriately gritty noir mystery of sorts, but not really. All presented in a painfully flouncy package, making it a so-so read but good thought experiment.