Brett Alexander Savory

Well, that was...weird.

To be honest, I would expect nothing less from a story that escaped the moist thing in Brett Savory's skull. If you read In and Down, you know what I'm talking about.

But this novel is a completely different ...okay, I was going to say different animal, but that's not right...completely different machine. The novel is long on action, and quite frankly, this is where the book sings. The reader is thrown into it at the beginning, then for an extended period toward the last third of the novel as well.

Overall--and I'll be the first one to say this is not my standard line--while I often kind of wondered what the hell was happening, I quite enjoyed the novel. It sort of felt like David Lynch and Michael Bay came together to create the birth of Iron Giant by way of District 9 without the aliens. Sort of.

There were three things, however, that lessened the story for me.

The first was, as other people mentioned, the lack of explanations. Don't get me wrong, I'm not the reader that must have everything spelled out, and had it been a single plot point, I could get past it, but there was just so much here. Why do some people have this lead thing going on? Why, if they don't want the lead-suckers to ascend, do they essentially force them to get shot? Why does the hospital know about them when no one else remembers them? Why do some turn into ghosts? And so on...

Toward the end, Savory had to do some internal dialogue on Henry, but it came across as a touch melodramatic and awfully tell at times. It's a minor quibble, but it's there.

The final thing? The last page or so. I won't spoil it, and I think I may have a take on it, but overall, if taken literally...then no. But, like I said, I have my own take on it, that lessens the absolute disregard for the laws of the physical universe.

Would any of this stop me from reading additional Savory offerings? Hell no. Like I said, the stuff that springs from that moist tissue of his is always interesting, and definitely something different from the usual fluff. Even if his writing falls flat (which I haven't read yet, to be honest), it's still, at least, a grand experiment in trying to give the public something different from the usual pablum.… (more)

This isn't a book I would normally read, but I tend to now run in the same circles as the author, and bought this book when we were in side-by-side booths selling our wares.

I rode this novel like a rollercoaster. I truly enjoyed the first half, even though it felt much like a good portion of it was dream sequence (a writing trick I despise). Then, the dream sequence part seemed to take over and I found I wasn't enjoying the story as much, even though I realized it was less dream and more Alice in Wonderland, albeit through the twisted mind of the author.

In fact, after going through a series of scenes--with more to come--where it seemed the protagonist was more of a pinball pinging from place to place, meeting different people for no apparent reason, there was a quote that I flagged from the book that, at that particular moment, seemed to echo my state of mind:

Michael doesn't have the patience for these kinds of conversations anymore.

However, within a few pages of that quote, the novel seemed to course correct and I enjoyed it again. I didn't think the revelations at the end were earth-shattering, but they were logical and I saw the work the author put into building to these points.

I guess sometimes you just need to see the whole to appreciate the parts along the way. There's a part of me that still believes this might have been better as a shorter novella, but overall, with the Alice in Wonderland overtones and the David Lynchian undertones, it's absolutely worth the read.… (more)