This story was like a twenty minute, high-intensity workout. It’s brief, grueling, and damn do you feel it when you’re finished.
Good ol’ Joe has alwayThis story was like a twenty minute, high-intensity workout. It’s brief, grueling, and damn do you feel it when you’re finished.
Good ol’ Joe has always put story first—and this is one bizarre story. He isn’t preachy or didactic. As more and more modern literature of all genres creeps in that direction, it becomes all the more retroactively refreshing to read stories that are just cool stories. Not patronizing or pandering. Not reactionary. No requirements for a ‘likeable’ protagonist, or a ‘subversion/deconstruction’ of tropes. No overt, condescending political message. Just unadulterated, unhinged creativity and gorgeous, bloody prose.
Paul Marder (which may be an antonym of martyr) was a scientist partially responsible for the destruction of earth and the death of his own daughter. His wife, an artist who now despises him, gouged a tattoo/scarification of their late daughter’s image engulfed in a mushroom cloud onto his back which bleeds from the eyes after strenuous movement.
He monotonously documents his misery and the horrific events happening around him in his journal. He is a dead man in all but the flesh.
Moaning, black-brained, human hunting, organ-supplanting plants inherit the earth as Paul has pseudo-incestuous, guilt-ridden dreams about his daughter.
For such a short story, the world is so much better realized than a lot of post-apocalyptic, dystopian epics I’ve tried slogging through. It presages Scott Smith’s The Ruins and is a wondrously distressing Freudian fever dream....more
I’m just extemporaneously drawing some additional attention to a quite clear consensus that this glorngl this book is lowkey lit af fam no cap like fr
I’m just extemporaneously drawing some additional attention to a quite clear consensus that this gloriously macabre, enduringly portentous novel is a triumph of literary terror as I endlessly gather my endless thoughts on the page.
(Substantive review forthcoming…sometime this century. Someone give me a deadline)!
I’ll probably reread one more time, but the next month will be spent pinning this review down....more
The Reylo sequel trilogy of movies could have been vastly improved if this series was used as the blueprint. Instead, they opted for remaking A New HoThe Reylo sequel trilogy of movies could have been vastly improved if this series was used as the blueprint. Instead, they opted for remaking A New Hope, defiling legacy characters, deconstructionist pablum, and retconned fan service (in that order).
I haven’t watched any of the subsequent Disney+ series, but following The Legacy of the Force story rather than wiping the canonical Expanded Universe slate clean, we could have been spared Boba Fett becoming a bloated Tusken Raider activist with Stockholm Syndrome? I don’t know. Again, I didn’t watch it.
I’m not a bitter fanboy. Star Wars probably should have been put out to pasture some time ago if preservation of artistic integrity was the goal, but what could have been is more fun to think about than watching what we actually got.
In this series, Han and Leia still have a son, Jacen in this timeline, who flirts and struggles with the dark side. Boba Fett was still extricated from the sarlacc pit (and being post-prequel trilogy, and in keeping with Boba Fett as a clone, his body is turning against him, riddling him with tumors. He is hunting down all surviving clones of The Clone Wars, and he fathered a now estranged daughter [so clones produce viable sperm. Good to know]).
This is the second book of nine in this series, but I read it first as a teenager because I saw Boba Fett on the cover.
Another civil war is brewing, threatening stability as the Skywalker-Solo families struggle to maintain peace and order within their families and the galaxy. If I return to a Star Wars EU series, it will likely be this one....more
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