Nate

Ugh. I really really wanted to like this book, but it was a SLOG to get through. After being catapulted through a fantastic first third-ish, I tried to ride that momentum to the end, but it petered out hard.

Three things ruined this book for me more than anything else.

First off, the writing style/length. Holy shit this dude is verbose in the most useless way possible. It was padded out like a bad highschool essay. At least a third of this novel should have been left on the cutting room floor.

If you're going to describe literally every place and room and character down to the shoes on their feet and the texture of the floor, at least do some fucking environmental storytelling with it.

You don't need to tell me about every single character's red/brown/black coat/jacket/sweater with holes/dirt/tears. Tell me what they do differently. How they're surviving. Tell me about the orphan trying to hide two golden rings on a chain under his shirt. Tell me about the old man with prison tattoo style tally marks on his face. Tell me about anything that could be remotely interesting about these people that I can care about.

Same with the corpses that are literally everywhere and used as lazy grimdark set dressing. Just telling me there're bodies everywhere gets repetitive and boring real fast. Give me something interesting to grab onto. Show me a family in a bedroom and empty pill bottles. Show me cars at the bottom of ravines. Show me remains that tell me something about these people in their final moments, protection/betrayal/love/fear/regret/ANYTHING. Instead it's just spooky skeletons everywhere, no humans anywhere.

Also UGH sometime after around the halfway point, the prose slips into this weird hokey colloquial corny ass country voice for the rest of the book?

Secondly, and this one is kinda nitpicky, but there's a shitload of fridge logic in this book. Fridge logic works in a two hour movie because I don't really have time to do the math on how much food you'd need to find to feed an army of thousands for seven years in a post apocalyptic scavenger society. But in a thousand page book?? I'm constantly taken out of it by the absolute nonsensical shit that is just glossed over. No one's refining gas, but they have barrels and barrels of usable gasoline after seven years? It's raining and muddy all the time but somehow people are still finding cardboard boxes to sleep in?

Even worse, we're introduced to a group of orphans after the seven year time skip, who have been living alone for the most part the entire time. They're all 10-17ish, so they were 3-10ish when the bombs dropped. They all speak better English, and besides the fact that they're kinda dirty, are way smarter and more civilized than I was at that age. You'd expect some kind of unique culture to emerge right? Some unique traditions or slang or behaviors/fears/traumas? Nah. McCammon is more interested in telling you that the cave walls are slightly damp and shiny and that the room is warm and smells like stale gunpowder and farts.

Finally, I REALLY wish someone would have told me that this novel is basically Christian prosperity doctrine fanfiction. The core philosophy of this book is repulsive and implies some shitty beliefs.

The Good characters are all born Good. Goodness is an intrinsic quality and Good characters are surrounded by Good people, they do Good things and Good things happen to them. They don't have to make any difficult decisions because the Right path is always clear. There's always a heroic option for them to take and they take it without any second thoughts because they were divinely chosen and have magic powers and this is their destiny and they are Good and Righteous and blah blah blah

The Evil characters are all intrinsically Evil, etc etc etc.

No fucking nuance, no depth, no challenge, no growth. People are what they were born to be and nothing else.

It's a survivalist wasteland, but only the evil characters have to make any difficult choices. Why do they have to compromise their morals to survive? Because they were born evil and deserve to be punished, obviously.

I have more to say, but this is getting way too long and I think I might be ranting at this point.

First third of this book, up to the bombs dropping? 5/5. Everything up to the timeskip? ~3.5/5. Everything after? 1/5 at best.

Repetitive writing over top-tier worldbuilding.

Hyboria is an amazing setting filled with incredible locations, interesting (albeit kinda racist) cultures, and badass characters. It's a shame Howard plays everything so safely. He quickly locks into a repeatable structure, and never gives it up.

His minority and female characters go from being capable, strong, and interesting in earlier stories, to being relegated to trope-y garbage by the end. He was writing for mainstream appeal and not feeding his inner-auteur and it shows.

There is so much unachieved potential here, and it's super depressing it was never fulfilled.

One of the best fictional universes ever created. Shit stories though.

Standouts include “The Hour of the Dragon” (best story), “Red Nails” (setting is too fucking cool. Definitely stealing for a DnD campaign. Could do without Conan being so rapey in this one. Also racism.), “The Tower of the Elephant” (Lovecraftian as fuck, probably the best overall, and first I'd recommend), and “The Slithering Shadow” (Drugged out city of sleeping sorcerers worshipping a timeless tentacle god? Coolest shit ever. Story? Pretty bad).

aaaaaand the illusion Blake Crouch had cast on me is completely shattered.

2/5 instead of a 1 because despite everything, I really like the way Blake Crouch writes. His books are so tightly edited and efficient that I just kind of look at one of his books out of the corner of my eye and suddenly I'm 150 pages in. I don't know how he does it and as much flak as he gets for it, it takes real talent to put so little obstacle between the information on the page and the brain of the reader. His style reminds me of like.. a super simple dish done to perfection, or maybe even a Barnett Newman painting. The kind of painting where at first you're like ‘ok, just a big red canvas' then you walk closer and realize how absolutely flawlessly it's done. It takes a lot more confidence and dexterity to perform this efficiently than he really gets credit for.

Everything else about this book suuuuuuuucks. Holy shit.

I am so disappointed. I thought maybe, just MAYBE, in the Crouch novel where the protagonist is a failed scientist who accidentally gets upgraded into a hyper-intelligent post-human genius we'd get a plot that isn't just resolved by meathead jingoistic pewpew gunfight bullshit. But I guess not.

It blows my mind how hard the ball got fumbled on this. Like what even does Crouch think intelligence is? Because the answer he comes to in this book is being smarter = being better at shoot gun good.

You would think, that in a novel pitting the two smartest humans who ever lived against each other in a high concept battle of wits to decide the philosophical path the human species will take in their race against a self-imposed extinction due to climate change / inequality, that maybe there would be some cat-and-mouse style twists and turns? Plans and subterfuge and subversion and tricks and backstabbing and I dunno, drama? Maybe a philosophical debate or two where we can see their opposing viewpoints? Nah, of course not. It's a Blake Crouch book. So fuck all the pretense, here's some pewpew gunfight bullshit.

Suffers a bit from middle book syndrome but is still a really solid read.

While I love the heavy handed way Dinniman fosters consistent interest and narrative drive through big plot twists and dramatic cliff-hangers, one thing I've noticed more throughout this entry is the more gentle handed, subtle approach he uses for character development and dramatic elements. It's a really well coordinated two-pronged attack that works incredibly well. The pathos is surprisingly effective and grounded for what is ostensibly outrageous and ridiculous and for me that's the quintessential core element of what makes this series work for me as well as it does.

Really good! There are some serious eye rolling bits, but I ate this shit up. Already preordered book 2. Closest contender yet to Dinneman's Kaiju:BS and the DCC litrpg throne.