Carlos Indriago Indriago itibaren Markfield, Leicestershire, İngiltere
This book definitely had the "can't put it down" quality that Stephenie Meyer's other books have had. It made me gasp, cry, sacrifice sleep, grind my teeth, and smile. What more can you ask of from a book?
(this is copied over from my Amazon Vine review) I haven't read much in the urban fantasy sub-genre unless you count Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels. The other thing in the genre I can remember having read recently was Edghill's "The Sword of Maiden's Tears", which was okay but almost painfully an obvious projection of its target audience's wishes (i.e. lonely nerd girls wanting a broken elven prince to fix up and fall for). This is, as Americans would say, "a whole another can of worms", and there are indeed wormy, creepy, decadent, and just plain disturbing things in it. This is an England where the royal family is being eaten from the inside by the legacy of a demonic pact and a strange addictive drug, and where a government department is secretly tasked with binding a monster that could consume all of London and worse. That's the big picture. On the personal level, there are nasty little incidents like the main character forced to watch his girlfriend under the influence of said drug have frenzied sex with a man he detests, and the titular Domino Men - two agents whose role I never quite figured out - releasing into a crowded nightclub a powder that makes people sneeze uncontrollably till they bleed out from the lungs. To me, the worst thing about this sadistic pair is that they are not actually the "bad guys". The climax of the book is a scene of citywide pollution and horror worse than the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. To save England and possibly the world, the hero, like another a generation before him, has to sacrifice himself in a way repulsive almost beyond imagining. This is not what I call "technical fantasy", the kind whose authors seem to have either gotten muddled up with science fiction, played too much Dungeons and Dragons, or both. Writers like that tend to lay out rules for how stuff happens as if there are little tables of quantitative parameters in an appendix somewhere. Despite the modern setting of the story, Barnes understands that magic doesn't follow the same rules as physics, and that fantasy fiction has to have claws deep into mystery while somehow seeming to make sense. You can't even understand why some people do what they do, and certain phenomena remain inexplicable, even at the end. After a book like this, I don't sleep well at night, but I want to read more. Make of that what you will.
I read and re-read this book so many times in high school and college, underlining and highlighting and making notations, that the book was practically falling apart. I used to use it to do readings from for public speaking classes. This book was like my bible. And then I lent it to some kid who had never read it because I couldn't imagine anyone never having read this book, and I never saw it again. I get sad everytime I think about that.
i need to read this one again. i read it in 10th grade...dillard teaches you how to see again.