Full review: http://realmofryan.blogspot.com/2009/... ( )

Like an M Night Shyamalan movie, it starts out slow and interesting and very slowly builds. That's where it diverges, as it takes a long time for it to get to the part where it's supposed to be scary... but never quite makes it. The climax takes on more of a murder mystery feel, which wasn't what I was looking for. Still, I always enjoy Bear's writing style and was a welcome change my my usual Sci-Fi fare. ( )

Pretty awful. ( )

Peter Russell is a largely out-of-work director and photographer (of titillating films and nude shots) with a gentle fondness for the ladies and a tragic love of the drink he no longer allows himself to have. He's recently-divorced, and only one of his two daughters still lives. Then a chance at redemption arrives: he's offered an opportunity to promote a new telecom company, one that has developed a revolutionary new communications device called Trans. Trans transmits with utter clarity across a newly-discovered bandwidth. His great opportunity is tainted, however: by self-doubt, fear of failure, the recent death of his best friend... and a new darkness that has entered his life. Everywhere he turns he sees things, things he shouldn't see. Dead things and memories of the living. Hungry things. And he isn't the only one...

On the surface of it this doesn't sound terrifically unusual. However, the actual book is quite different from others I've read. It doesn't concentrate on the plot so much as Peter Russell, a complex and fascinating person. He's the perfect conduit with which to draw the reader into the story.

The plot unfurls and unwinds rather than racing along, free to take some rather unusual twists and turns. This is one of the few books I've read where the reader's attention isn't drawn to the twists, with each one baldly pointed out; instead they're simply a part of what's happening, completely natural and organic. There are multiple mysteries wrapped up in this book's plot, but it's easy to forget to think of them as mysteries because they simply unfold as another natural part of the larger succession of events. Who killed Peter's daughter? What mysterious force at his friend Joseph's odd mansion blocks the Trans from working there? And can anything reverse the horror that is being visited upon the living?

So many details in this book ring true and bring it alive. Greg Bear takes the story at least one or two steps further than any other author would, and he does it beautifully. If you don't need constant explosions and chainsaws in order to enjoy your thrillers and horror, if you're looking for a kind of fear that maybe, just maybe, highlights some of the beauty in this world, then I highly recommend Greg Bear's "Dead Lines." Once I started I could barely put it down.

Full review at ErrantDreams ( )

In the near future, wireless bandwidth for data transmission is at a premium, with demand outstripping supply. Then a brand-new channel is discovered that allows almost infinite volumes of data to be transmitted instantaneously. But strange things are happening to the users of this bandwidth, and the most likely explanation is scariest of all: this new channel may well be the pathway the dead use to get from this life to the next.