Claw

by Wildbow

Joshua Munce, Sheila Hardy, Dan Whitely, Max Highland, Tonya Keifer, Marvin Su… this pair has many names, but those names aren’t their own; they’re names to sell. In a rigged and crumbling system, the only way to get ahead is to circumvent the rules, but that comes with its own risks. Police, investigations, prison. There are other ways, more insulated, which are to play assist to help those people. Helping them to disappear, cleaning up messes, escrow services for the handling of good, payment, or guests. Always keeping it professional, keeping things insulated, with layers of distance. When others panic, with too many variables to consider in the heat of the moment, they can do the thinking. Who would suspect this mom and dad with two kids?

Genres: Crime, Thriller

ebook

Published March 9, 2024

About the author

Wildbow (real name John C. McCrae, born in 1984), is a Canadian writer of Web Serial Novels.

His works include:

Worm
Pact
Twig
Ward (sequel to Worm)

(From http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...)

Reviews

[Dawson Escott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I honestly wasn't expecting a new contender for favorite Wildbow book, but for Claw he changed his format, style, and tone quite a bit and I think it largely was a huge success. Typically, he writes insanely long form books, this one could be finished comfortably in a month or two. Typically, they're full of fantastic powers, this one has a realism throughout, characters limited in power that take beatings and really have to recover from them. The environment is hyperdystopian, but it's still awfully real too, taking note of a lot of the worst news stories and just tweaking them a little-- believably our universe with a couple pendulums swinging the wrong way at the wrong time for a little too long and toppling the stability of institutions. All of this made for a great change of pace and a valuable experiment which I hope he can carry over the lessons from to future works.

I think I've said in past reviews that Wildbow is best at the small-scale character drama and development, but that in his work this talent comes into conflict with a desire to always be escalating and to have spectacular, climatic, city-level conflicts which to me get so big and chaotic that as a reader its a muddle to get through. This book thrives because, even in its biggest scale scenes, it does not lose track of the interpersonal heart of the book.

The central family drama + moral dilemma is really compelling and even in this shorter format, Wildbow is able to explore it in full. I would say he also often falls prey to making his hateable characters cartoonishly hateable, and while I felt that way about Natalie for a while, by the end he successfully got me as a reader to still empathize and be invested in her development. The moral ambiguity which a lot of readers attribute (to me a little generously) to his other works was here I think fully effectively done, again I believe thanks to the realistic moral mess of a setting and having protagonists who aren't really doing their best to be good people, but instead operate according to their own backwards-rationalized moral code.

The only light criticism I have, other than a couple of to me dud action chapters, is that there are moments where the pacing stumbles and the story seems to pick up pace a little too suddenly or a storyline is wrapped up too fast. I think these are understandable hiccups for an author who until this point wrote books that were like 20 novels long and is now pivoting to a work that's maybe 2-3 books long. The pros of making a focused, condensed work much outweighed the cons and he honestly continues to be my favorite fiction writer of the present day.

[Pat Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wildbow delivers tense, character driven action as always with a lovable band of misfits.

While enjoyable, I did still feel that, despite this being his shortest work yet, the story did feel slightly bloated. I think this is caused by the narrative arc focusing primarily on one conflict, as opposed to his prior works where the status quo regularly shifts.

I think the grounded nature of this tale lends itself to the shorter format it encompasses, but limits Wildbow’s ability to lose us in a fantastical world or magic/power system. Good read still though, excited for more shorter tales like this.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly enjoyable!

I expected the "serial" aspect of this story to last for a lot longer than it did. I enjoyed the different takes on parent-child relationships, but general felt Valentina to be one of the weaker characters (both in her characterization which wasn't always consistent, and plots based on her which were sometimes too exaggerated). I'm easily swept up by anti-true-crime themes and those did not fail to deliver!

Like the other review mentioned, things kinda fell apart in the end, but I can't be too hard there as the questions of the end were compelling to me.

[LMM Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved how Wildbow experimented with different types of problem-solving in this one. Brought down a bit by the ending; a lot of sudden and jarring leaps had to be made to get us to a central question that didn't seem very important by that point in the story.