Pieces on Speculative Fiction

5 stars out of 5. Perfect Circle is brilliant story about ‘Dead’ Kennedy, who can see ghosts and has to embrace his talent for a living. It’s a small story, sad story and story with hope. 243 pages packed with hot goodness that everyone should read.

Will ‘Dead’ Kennedy is in his thirties and got fired once again. He can see her daughter only occasionally, because her ex-wife has the custody. Out of the blue a cousin offers him thousand bucks to check his garage for ghosts. From there on everything gets more complicated for Will.

Stewart has a talent for writing great characters, who haven’t really succeeded in life in conventional terms. In other words, Stewart writes about normal people.

The final spurt through the rest of the book didn’t do much change my earlier stance, World’s End was a book that didn’t thrill me. Nevertheless I have hard time of giving it less than three stars, because there weren’t any obvious flaws. Besides the fact that I never managed to get engaged by the story. The plot wasn’t predictable to any meaningful degree, characters weren’t cardboard cutouts and writing was good enough. Rainy afternoon romp, nothing more, nothing less.

My first impressions post said most that I have to say about World’s End. While I do like Chadbourn’s use of different myths, I prefer it when the use is less epic. Secret history/behind the scenes/invisible world is the aproach for me. Hopefully the two latter parts of Age of Misrule are more engaging, but I fear that it will be quite a while before I read those.

Mark Chadbourn’s World’s End might be one of those books that I could just leave lying around for ages after reading about 300 pages. The lack of immersion just keeps me from diving into the story. Funnily enough I bought an British omnibus edition that has the whole Age of Misrule trilogy.

Idea of World’s End is that dark sort of fairie is coming back to the modern world and with it technology is slowly breaking down. Magic is coming back and science is on back pedal. Nothing wrong with that except that it’s really irking me that for example computers quit working, cars break down and yet gravity seems to be in working order. Somehow I don’t consider internal combustion engine to be scientific mumbo jumbo invention that would have hick ups when science goes. It seems to me that the idea hasn’t been quite thought through.

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