The thing about books: Much of the time, the book you decide to read has no marketing push, no clear indication of its target audience until you’ve invested, at the least, a few dozen pages. Books simply have no trailers. Books often have no (or very few) reviews. Even the blurbs that coat the back and front matter are often misleading, coming from no-names and friends of the author, or second and third tier publications.
Movies don’t. With movies, you get all of the above in abundance. And they help. Enormously. And you get movie trailers, which have saved me countless dollars I’m sure. I typically know what I’m getting going in, and can adjust my expectations accordingly. Even better — it’s over in two hours. With a book, it often takes many more hours of reading to understand how good, bad, or mediocre the book is likely to be.
I know I’m generalizing here. And for those of us who read blogs religiously, the time investment helps steer us in the right direction far more reliably than all of the above examples and their respective shortcomings. But, sometimes blogs are wrong.
Or in this case, more wrong than right. I was inspired to read this particular novel after reading an author interview on a blog I check out once in a while.
Pandemonium is a book of interesting ideas, but it never really gets off the ground. Characterization is bland, the plot by the numbers, and some of the plot points feel tacked on and in some cases unbelievable — particularly the relationship between the priest and the narrator in the last third of the novel.
And what about the palindromes?
But more importantly, the world Gregory creates simply doesn’t feel believable. Instead, it feels stifled by a lack of scope. Gregory’s ideas would have been much more interesting on a more epic scale, and early on, I thought that might be where the novel was heading, as Del’s quest led him to Dr. Ram and a mysterious person named Valis. But the novel quickly turned the narrator on his heels and the book morphed into a run-of-the-mill, on-the-run, less-than-compelling, cross-country adventure.
Pandemonium was more kiddie pool. I was hoping for a more adult-swim experience.
Overall, a superficial stab at some interesting ideas that deserve a much deeper exploration. A mildly amusing popcorn genre romp. Don’t expect much and you’ll come away feeling satisfied. This novel could have used a movie trailer or two.
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