Shawn
Some books you come back to wondering if they’ll hold up. This isn’t one of those. I read the Chronicles in high school, read them again about ten years ago, and picked them up again now knowing exactly what I was going to get — and getting every bit of it.
Weis and Hickman built something that shouldn’t work on paper: a fantasy epic grown from a D&D campaign, written fast, published across a single year. And yet the emotional architecture is genuinely sound. The deaths land. The character arcs earn their conclusions. The theology of the ending — not good triumphant, but balance restored, and the reasoned argument for why that’s the only outcome that could ever hold — is more ambitious than the genre usually attempts and more satisfying than most books that try.
Raistlin remains one of the best characters in fantasy fiction. His farewell poem, addressed to Caramon in the closing pages, is the most honest thing he says across the entire trilogy. Flint’s death in Godshome is still the emotional center of Book Three and it still works completely. And Tasslehoff Burrfoot — played for comic relief for two and a half books — becomes something genuinely moving by the end, which is a harder trick than it looks.
Third read. Still a five. Still a personal favorite. Some things you just know.
Some books you come back to wondering if they’ll hold up. This isn’t one of those. I read the Chronicles in high school, read them again about ten years ago, and picked them up again now knowing exactly what I was going to get — and getting every bit of it.
Weis and Hickman built something that shouldn’t work on paper: a fantasy epic grown from a D&D campaign, written fast, published across a single year. And yet the emotional architecture is genuinely sound. The deaths land. The character arcs earn their conclusions. The theology of the ending — not good triumphant, but balance restored, and the reasoned argument for why that’s the only outcome that could ever hold — is more ambitious than the genre usually attempts and more satisfying than most books that try.
Raistlin remains one of the best characters in fantasy fiction. His farewell poem, addressed to Caramon in the closing pages, is the most honest thing he says across the entire trilogy. Flint’s death in Godshome is still the emotional center of Book Three and it still works completely. And Tasslehoff Burrfoot — played for comic relief for two and a half books — becomes something genuinely moving by the end, which is a harder trick than it looks.
Third read. Still a five. Still a personal favorite. Some things you just know.
I’ll be honest — I came to this one a bit late, and my zombie phase has mostly run its course. So I had to work a little harder to get past the premise and into what the book is actually doing, which turns out to be quite a lot. Brooks is really writing about institutional failure, geopolitical hubris, and what gets stripped away from people when everything collapses — the zombies are almost incidental. The oral history format is genuinely clever; no single narrator means no clean truth, and you’re constantly doing the work of piecing things together yourself.
The standout sections are the ones that feel least like zombie fiction — the stolen Chinese nuclear submarine, the blind atomic bomb survivor alone in the mountains, the ISS crew deciding to stay in orbit. Those hit hard. The straight combat chapters are fine but less interesting to me now than they would’ve been a few years ago.
Three stars feels right — I’m glad I read it, I respect what it’s doing, but I’m probably not the audience for it anymore.
I’ll be honest — I came to this one a bit late, and my zombie phase has mostly run its course. So I had to work a little harder to get past the premise and into what the book is actually doing, which turns out to be quite a lot. Brooks is really writing about institutional failure, geopolitical hubris, and what gets stripped away from people when everything collapses — the zombies are almost incidental. The oral history format is genuinely clever; no single narrator means no clean truth, and you’re constantly doing the work of piecing things together yourself.
The standout sections are the ones that feel least like zombie fiction — the stolen Chinese nuclear submarine, the blind atomic bomb survivor alone in the mountains, the ISS crew deciding to stay in orbit. Those hit hard. The straight combat chapters are fine but less interesting to me now than they would’ve been a few years ago.
Three stars feels right — I’m glad I read it, I respect what it’s doing, but I’m probably not the audience for it anymore.
Beatty is ferociously funny and uncomfortably right. The absurdity never feels cheap — every joke is doing serious work. Dickens appearing on the weather map at the end genuinely got me. Dense, demanding, and worth every page. Docking one star because some stretches made me feel like I was missing half the references — but maybe that’s the point.
Beatty is ferociously funny and uncomfortably right. The absurdity never feels cheap — every joke is doing serious work. Dickens appearing on the weather map at the end genuinely got me. Dense, demanding, and worth every page. Docking one star because some stretches made me feel like I was missing half the references — but maybe that’s the point.
I wanted this one to work for me more than it did, but I never really connected with the characters or got invested in the story. There are some interesting ideas here and the writing has its moments, but overall it kept me at a distance and just didn’t land for me.
I wanted this one to work for me more than it did, but I never really connected with the characters or got invested in the story. There are some interesting ideas here and the writing has its moments, but overall it kept me at a distance and just didn’t land for me.