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Made my way through the first four Laundry Files books. I enjoyed them quite a bit, although they consistently had endings that just fell flat for me. The fourth book does leave me looking forward to the next one though. But if I may bitch for a moment... Bob and Mo have the most uninteresting relationship. I was seriously bummed out that Ramona the succubus/half BLUE HADES didn't stick around, because their one book of dealing with each other was more interesting and entertaining to read than anything Bob and Mo have done in four books. The only really interesting aspect of Mo is her violin.
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Jan 26, 2013 06:21
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Friendless posted:I'm also just starting The Imago Sequence. Picked it up after it was recommended in the thread. It's definitely above the median for short horror fiction, but I'm two stories in and despite good elements it feels a little unpolished. I think my biggest problem is that it feels to me like he can't keep a firm hold on his narrators' voices. In Old Virginia I never felt like I was seeing things through the narrator's eyes, and his reactions to things rang false. In Shiva, Open Your Eye it was like the narrator kept switching between his two aspects (mortal manifestation of something eternal nearing the end of its life / the eternal thing itself). I never got the sense that I was listening to the former fumbling to understand the latter, which is the part of the story that really interested me. I was pretty disappointed in this book overall. Outside of the characterization issues, Barron's writing was just good enough to let me figure out what he's shooting for with each story, but not good enough to really make me give a poo poo. The stories can be a bit scatterbrained at times, and I kept feeling the same sense of disappointment at the endings. The Imago Sequence, the story the book took its title from, was probably my favorite of the bunch but even it suffered from an ending that just sort of...happened. I don't think I'll really dig through his other stuff at this point. I know he seems relatively popular around here, and he seems to have cool ideas, but he just doesn't tell the story well.
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Mar 26, 2014 21:45
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