Scott Hawkins

Holy hell, what did I just read?

Imagine, if you will, Clive Barker's [b:The Great and Secret Show|32628|The Great and Secret Show (Book of the Art #1)|Clive Barker|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407710558s/32628.jpg|942597] sitting at a bar. Neil Gaiman's [b:American Gods|30165203|American Gods|Neil Gaiman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1462924585s/30165203.jpg|1970226] comes in, sits down, and buys the Barker book a drink. Probably something mixed by Alan Moore. They slow dance to show more Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, then go back to one of their bedrooms and make sweet, sweet love. Nine months later, this is the book you would get from that union.

That's the best I can do. That's the only description I can think of, and trust me, I thought about this a lot as I went through this amazing novel.

I will say, for the first quarter of this book, I mostly thought, What the hell am I even reading? None of this makes sense. Characters come and go and I don't know why.

For the next quarter of the book, I began to understand the shape of the story, and I thought, Enh. It's okay, but nothing to write home about. Some neat concepts, but where is it all leading?

Then, around the halfway point, shit began to happen. I sat up and took notice. Then, shit turned left, then left again. Then shit went into seventeen dimensional space. I was hooked.

The first half is necessary set-up. The last half? It's fucking genius. I am in awe of Scott Hawkins.

This book easily...easily wins best book of the year for me. Nothing else I have, or will read this year will come close to its scope, its imagination, or sheer breathtaking wonder.

It's a shame I can only award five stars. This one sits in a dimensional reality all its own, and in that reality, it wins all the stars. show less

Strange, violent, darkly farcical, and unlike anything else that comes to mind. There’s a missing-‘person’ mystery, some cosmic horror, a revenge fantasy adventure, and a library that contains the entire universe inside a house on a hill in a suburb of the Dead. A dandy blood-jiggling entertainment.

This book is filled with horror, right from the very first lines. Visceral, gory, bloody, stinking horror. (I have to say that the descriptions of all the terrible odors will not be doing your olfactory sense any favors, although it is a great big mark in the book's favor.) But even with all the guts, splattered brains, and senseless violence, the objective of the story is not horror (meaning read with fantasy protocols.)

There is the old saying that any sufficiently advanced science is show more indistinguishable from magic. It follows then, that the requirements for godhood might simply be the contents of a large enough library, and the time to learn it all.

This book is an examination of what that scenario might be like for a human in the modern world, and I thought it was an interesting take on it. Not perfect, but very entertaining. show less

A missing God. A library with the secrets to the universe. A woman too busy to notice her heart slipping away.
Carolyn is a librarian. But she's not the usual kind of librarian you think of when you hear that word. She is one of twelve students of a man she knows as "Father". He's a very powerful man who "adopted" her and eleven others that are now known as her siblings. This all happened when they were all still children. Father has a vast library and each of his twelve students is show more responsible for reading, understanding, and mastering a specific catalog from in the library. These books, like their owner, are not ordinary, and the power that they contain is beyond what a normal human being could ever imagine. Father will settle for nothing less than the highest level of effort, success, and obedience from his students, even if he has to use brute force to get it.

But now Father has gone missing, and the librarians have come together to try to find out where he's gone and if he's okay. The dynamics between Carolyn and her "siblings" aren't what most people would ever describe as functional, but they do all have the same interest...to find the man that raised them and to retuning soon to the library to continue their studies. But to do so, they will need to enlist the help of some outsiders...some Americans. Their involvement quickly reveals there is much more going on here than meets the eye.

The book definitely seems a little strange at first, and that's because IT IS different. Until you get a sense of Carolyn and the backstory, it's easy to wonder what in the world is going on. You'll wonder that through most of this book, but each chapter shows a "different way". As it all starts to come together, if you're like me, you will be in awe at the various other hints that have been dropped along the way...and how many you overlooked or missed entirely.

Scott Hawkins does an excellent job of keeping the story moving along and occasionally inserting what he labels as "Interludes" along the way, which take the reader back in time before the current story, providing just enough of Carolyn's past to help to better understand what is going on in the present. Amazingly, the character dynamics and interactions don't disappoint at all.

I don't usually recommend books unless I know the reading preference of the individual fairly well, but I would definitely give this one a high recommendation.... especially if you are fan of dark fantasy. show less