Audrey
An overall predictable and mediocre journey. My biggest gripes are how the book is compared to Piranesi, but lacks the space characterization that Piranesi has, and how the book relies so heavily on academic knowledge of logic that you really should be a college student if you want to read this book. While twists are predictable after you've read enough in your life, you can still make a twist enjoyable. Books like Gideon the Ninth or Harrow the Ninth had twists that were exciting to follow with books the same length as Katabasis, while as the best part of Katabasis was the last 5% of the book (when it wasn't being overwritten).
Otherwise it was fine. Probably just not my thing.
Fantastic. This is a great horror book because it relies on persistent and consistent bleakness, failure, and rejection on the part of the MC. When everything continuously goes wrong, and when it's hard to tell where someone else's fault stops and your fault starts, I think there is a lot of room for the horror of desperation. There is a good amount of animal cruelty in the book, but it isn't overly descriptive or inappropriately gorey imo.
I want to thank NetGalley for the ARC.
I have some mixed feelings about this one as there are many pros and cons that leave the story as an average yet enjoyable read.
Some of the pros of this story are the spreads and when the author uses less traditional story telling to explain character histories or explore emotional states. This is the benefit of graphic novels as a medium and is extremely enjoyable to see the color, design, and fluidity of panels and pages. It's a bit of a shame that it took a while to delve into this style.
The clear time jumping (to explore other parts of character history) was beneficial for our understanding of the characters and lore, and worked well because the pages were marked effectively.
One con includes the tone of the story. I could see what the author was going for with the police personality, but the humor wasn't landing with me. A lot of the way the comic and storyline was written was in a way that could be much easier to understand in a TV show or movie format, which makes sense based on the author's background. There was a lot of telling not showing during some dialogue heavy portions, and I really appreciated the times where the angles were played with or we could enjoy the character framing.
I don't think I can recommend anyone start this book, but if you're already reading it, then you'll hopefully enjoy it. It's Spanish classic literature, which means it's looong and rambling, with gorgeous prose and outdated themes that can be hard for modern readers (and non-Spanish readers) to understand. It took approximately 60% of the book before I was sufficiently hooked enough to enjoy it, otherwise I was reading because of a book club.
