Bridge Burner Hyperion

The Bridge Burner Trilogy #1

by Jared Rinaldi

The spiral at the center of time and space is broken, and it's up to a young bike mechanic to put it back together again. After losing his father to cancer, Will Koster goes on a cross-country bike trip to find himself, only proceeding to get lost in the New Mexican scrubland. He has somehow slipped under the pages of his map, and is falling deeper and deeper into worlds he doesn't understand but which need his help desperately.

Will is the key to putting the spiral back together, but certain nightmare creatures born from chaos would have it stay broken. Along with a band of miscreants, rogues and adventurers, Will is whisked away from his bike journey to reunite the father and son forces of Helios and Hyperion. The only problem is he has no idea how to do it.

244 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 2, 2014

Reviews

[Zack Klika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome characters

Loved the characters and overall story. Interesting plot with an imaginative setting. Looking forward to more from this author for sure.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I was expecting less The Walking Dead, Compendium 1and more Alice in Wonderland when I accepted Jared Rinaldi's petition to review Bridge Burner Hyperion, but I'm not sure the book is my thing. For one, Rinaldi's way of making the reader experience the horror he's placed around Will and the other characters is vibrant and obtrusive. The violence itself slams into my brain like the Jazz Man's saxophone calling down comets from the heavens. If this is your thing, then you've got a wealth of gore to explore. I found Will to be paper thin, a caricature of the reluctant, ignorant hero which suddenly blossoms and fades in a sequence I'm sure makes sense when the book is looked at as part one in a trilogy, but left me empty and wanting as a reviewer only given one of the three parts. It is in this same vein that I found the chapter on Lady Magdala as utterly empty as a gong rung with a mallet made of cotton. Here we have a seemingly regal figure, who has survived ages with the Sword of Light, and in the scope of one chapter she's taken out and helpless in a single glancing blow. If Rinaldi's point was to examine and show the helplessness and archaic emptiness of old gods as Drinkwater espoused, then he succeeded full well. It seemed that the Magdala was a spit of fire coming off the pan, and although bound to be important later, left me unaffected. As a woman it felt as one more example of the masculine will to denounce a woman warrior's strength and make her nothing more than a flimsy leaf on the Lover's Tree.

Rinaldi has fantastic use of world-building, and he has created a truly unique conglomerate of greco-roman myth peppered with norse, and there are parts of Bridge Burner Hyperion which I can see many would enjoy. I think then, this book is for a reader unaffected by little men with giggles in their guts and shovels imagining sticking their faces in an open wound and sucking out the blood and muscle fibre in grim detail. For this reviewer, the gore overpowered the plot and the characters underwhelmed the brilliant dystopic setting.