crawlkill posted:

Usually when I find a story inscrutable I find it easy to take refuge in the mental shelter of assuming the author was just bullshitting, but somehow that's not the takeaway I had from Hal Duncan's "Vellum" when I chugged the audiobook a year or two ago. It's got a sort of multiverse premise, but unusually for such stories, it seems to be more about mirrors of the same characters from world to world than it is a voyage between worlds (although one of those is going on in parallel)? And I think that characters' reflections across realities don't always have the same names? I think maybe the book just isn't conducive to audio processing (no ability to flip back and forth and compare stories). And then there's a bunch of god stuff? And nanites?

Basically, I don't get it, although it's possible I just wasn't paying enough attention/sufficiently sober at key points to parse it all correctly. Does anyone know of a comprehensive explanation for what's going on? I haven't read Ink, but I couldn't care less about THPOILERTH, so if that sequel renders less opaque the contents of the first, I'd be happy to hear about it. I really liked the book, in spite of not getting it at all, and keep meaning to reread it, but I'm daunted at the prospect of embarking on that journey again with no more of a map than I had the first time. Maybe I could take notes on all the character names Hal uses and try to figure out who's who?

It's so rare to read a novel and not even know by the end how many characters it had.