The Digging Leviathan

*note to self. Copy from A.

Fabulous ideas, beautiful writing, bloodless characters. Except for the paranoid man none of them seemed to have strong emotions, didn't react to the strange events around them. And even in the context of the story the stuff was still strange. Nobody to care about, didn't finish. ( )

Another amazing book by Blaylock. I was into Powers before Blaylock, and missed out on some of Blaylock’s earlier books, including The Digging Leviathan. Luckily, Babbage Press has been reprinting some of Blaylock’s older books in reasonably nice trade paperback editions (and they’re planning to do some of Powers’s works, too).

Anyway, the book: Most of this book takes place in modern day Los Angeles. It deals with the attempts of a typically odd group of amateur scientists to find a way into the interior of the earth by exploring deep tide pools. They are opposed by an assortment of scientists, psychiatrists, and even, at times, by the poet William Ashbless.

This book is clearly and strongly tied to Homunculus, with descendants of some of those characters appearing in Leviathan. It’s also tied to Powers’s The Anubis Gates through Ashbless, who appears to have survived until the events of the story. (There’s also a brief reference to Brendan Doyle and Steerforth Benner, characters from The Anubis Gates.)

I’ve yet to read a Blaylock or Powers book or story that I haven’t liked, and Leviathan is no exception. I can often strongly identify with Blaylock’s characters, if not their situations, and the quirks of these characters are in line with those in other Blaylock books. ( )