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War Blanket
The city is on its knees, drowning in flood water, middle management, counterfeit cigarettes and USB desk toys. The heat is unbearable, and the enigmatic 'War Blanket' is on everybody's lips. When a series of prophetic visions show it buried in the ice, a young couple head to the frozen 'New North' to find it.
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First published October 8, 2014
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About the author
Samuel Astbury
4 books13 followersSamuel Astbury is a writer and chronic malingerer from Manchester, England. He has written some books. He is also on YouTube, where he goes by the handle "Retro Muel," and enjoys talking about distinctly lowbrow pop culture.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 5, 2016
“I was feeling pretty anxious on the day the pavements cracked.”
That’s the first line of Samuel Astbury’s War Blanket, and it does draw you in. In fact, what has happened is that the protective smog that has shielded the narrator’s city from the worst of the growing heat has cleared, with consequences.
War Blanket is set in a near-future dystopia. Much of the world has become less viable because of climate change. We’re in a large city, possibly in the north of England, but it’s not very English. Many people are climate refugees, driven north, and many more are in asylum centres outside town. “This vertical city teems with algae, neon, glass, wet bamboo, pitchers of warm, shit beer, one-armed Eastern European barmaids, elderly Malaysian conmen dressed-up like Santa Claus, thread vein prostitutes rooting through the automated recycling bins.” Meanwhile, the original population lives in the bleak outskirts: “poorly educated and poorly housed... cheap tattoos and weapon dogs. ...Every other young male is a member of the English Defence League.” And there is the near-constant smog.
The narrator, a former social worker, now cares little for anything much. In the day, he writes advertising copy for King Province Double Premium Grade Nail Clippers. In the night he gets off his head on Ecstasy. One day he acquires a vintage artifact: a cathode ray tube television from the 1990s, a stand-alone device that can’t talk to the internet. One night, unbidden, it starts to talk to him. Faces appear through a sea of static and disappear, leaving cryptic messages. He is told of something called the War Blanket. Chasing a series of clues, he finds that the War Blanket is a criminal organization that is, among other things, exploiting the misery of the millions who are displaced by climate change. He is eventually told that he must seek it in the New North, where the warming climate has created a new frontier, a sort of Wild North. He and his girlfriend Angie go to Greenland. There they meet a grizzled old activist who seems to know where to find what they are looking for.
To find out if the War Blanket is there, one must read the book. In any case, the War Blanket itself may not be the point, because this book does what the very best speculative fiction does do – it creates a world that is as familiar as it is unfamiliar, jolting you into an appraisal of your own surroundings. There is also a shrewd critique of the idea of progress, presented not as an apocalypse driven by greed, but as the curious idea that progress has, in fact, stopped, locked into a continuous loop by the ubiquity of technology: “This record came out in 2003, and it still sounds like it was made yesterday. 2003 was when the permanent now started. 2003 was when things started repeating themselves: Social media, high-speed internet, ubiquitous mobile phones, the Rolling Stones became hip again..." We’re in a world in which past and future are oddly intertwined. We’re also in a world in which cultural homogeneity has pretty much gone away, replaced by a fragmented world in which people of a thousand different cultures are thrown against each other and must make the best of it, rather as they did in the Balkans before 1914 or the Middle East until recently. That this could be a consequence of climate change seems entirely logical.
A book with themes like this could be heavy going, but this one isn’t. Like Astbury’s last book, Cloud Storage, it’s packed with good descriptive writing that brings to life a disjointed, dislocating and dysfunctional world, strange enough to be novel yet familiar enough to be disturbing – a little like Orwell’s 1984. Moreover Astbury can be mischievously funny. The narrator’s boss lectures him about being proactive and ambitious; as he does so, a USB toy dances the macarena on his desk. A text message offers: “Free Drone Shipping with Prime Trial!” When the old hippy in the work camp gets too much, the narrator says, “**** it. You’re a really convenient plot device, you know?” There’s also a subtle, unspoken love story. Angie gently helps the narrator into a relationship to which he is not, in some ways, suited; yet he seems to be trying.
War Blanket can be read simply a standard piece of speculative fiction, but as with all the best such books, it repays closer reading. In this it has a lot in common with Cloud Storage, a superficially very different sort of book but just as subversive. I hope we’ll see more books from Astbury; it’ll be an interesting ride.
That’s the first line of Samuel Astbury’s War Blanket, and it does draw you in. In fact, what has happened is that the protective smog that has shielded the narrator’s city from the worst of the growing heat has cleared, with consequences.
War Blanket is set in a near-future dystopia. Much of the world has become less viable because of climate change. We’re in a large city, possibly in the north of England, but it’s not very English. Many people are climate refugees, driven north, and many more are in asylum centres outside town. “This vertical city teems with algae, neon, glass, wet bamboo, pitchers of warm, shit beer, one-armed Eastern European barmaids, elderly Malaysian conmen dressed-up like Santa Claus, thread vein prostitutes rooting through the automated recycling bins.” Meanwhile, the original population lives in the bleak outskirts: “poorly educated and poorly housed... cheap tattoos and weapon dogs. ...Every other young male is a member of the English Defence League.” And there is the near-constant smog.
The narrator, a former social worker, now cares little for anything much. In the day, he writes advertising copy for King Province Double Premium Grade Nail Clippers. In the night he gets off his head on Ecstasy. One day he acquires a vintage artifact: a cathode ray tube television from the 1990s, a stand-alone device that can’t talk to the internet. One night, unbidden, it starts to talk to him. Faces appear through a sea of static and disappear, leaving cryptic messages. He is told of something called the War Blanket. Chasing a series of clues, he finds that the War Blanket is a criminal organization that is, among other things, exploiting the misery of the millions who are displaced by climate change. He is eventually told that he must seek it in the New North, where the warming climate has created a new frontier, a sort of Wild North. He and his girlfriend Angie go to Greenland. There they meet a grizzled old activist who seems to know where to find what they are looking for.
To find out if the War Blanket is there, one must read the book. In any case, the War Blanket itself may not be the point, because this book does what the very best speculative fiction does do – it creates a world that is as familiar as it is unfamiliar, jolting you into an appraisal of your own surroundings. There is also a shrewd critique of the idea of progress, presented not as an apocalypse driven by greed, but as the curious idea that progress has, in fact, stopped, locked into a continuous loop by the ubiquity of technology: “This record came out in 2003, and it still sounds like it was made yesterday. 2003 was when the permanent now started. 2003 was when things started repeating themselves: Social media, high-speed internet, ubiquitous mobile phones, the Rolling Stones became hip again..." We’re in a world in which past and future are oddly intertwined. We’re also in a world in which cultural homogeneity has pretty much gone away, replaced by a fragmented world in which people of a thousand different cultures are thrown against each other and must make the best of it, rather as they did in the Balkans before 1914 or the Middle East until recently. That this could be a consequence of climate change seems entirely logical.
A book with themes like this could be heavy going, but this one isn’t. Like Astbury’s last book, Cloud Storage, it’s packed with good descriptive writing that brings to life a disjointed, dislocating and dysfunctional world, strange enough to be novel yet familiar enough to be disturbing – a little like Orwell’s 1984. Moreover Astbury can be mischievously funny. The narrator’s boss lectures him about being proactive and ambitious; as he does so, a USB toy dances the macarena on his desk. A text message offers: “Free Drone Shipping with Prime Trial!” When the old hippy in the work camp gets too much, the narrator says, “**** it. You’re a really convenient plot device, you know?” There’s also a subtle, unspoken love story. Angie gently helps the narrator into a relationship to which he is not, in some ways, suited; yet he seems to be trying.
War Blanket can be read simply a standard piece of speculative fiction, but as with all the best such books, it repays closer reading. In this it has a lot in common with Cloud Storage, a superficially very different sort of book but just as subversive. I hope we’ll see more books from Astbury; it’ll be an interesting ride.
August 18, 2015
I loved the first quarter of the novel with its literary prose that painted a bleak, apocalyptic vision of a probable future. The narrator experiences the decline of civilization, all while finding aspects to ponder and appreciate as he drifts along in a life of increasing solitude.
In the second quarter, romantic love enters the scene. The narrator does not desire a relationship, yet when he meets a young woman, a social worker, he cannot entirely let go of his need for companionship.
Near the midway point, a plot emerges that involves a mystery and a new cast of supporting characters. Although I welcome plots, I was surprised by the change in the quality of the prose and dialogue. I became aware of typos and misuse of words, such as 'arc' for 'ark'. Dialogue, which had been meaningful and sparse, appeared bland and included trivial interactions. Still, I cared about the main characters and wanted to know what the War Blanket was, so I read on.
In all, the strength of the novel is in the observations and descriptions that appear most frequently in the first half. For readers who seek intrigue and adventure, the second half will sustain interest.
February 10, 2015
The author has a distinct voice. It is a few stages after “steampunk” and is an acquired taste. “This vertical city teems with algae, neon, glass, wet bamboo, pitchers of warm, shit beer, one-armed Eastern European barmaids, elderly Malaysian conmen dressed-up like Santa Claus, thread vein prostitutes rooting through the automated recycling bins.” …“An old Romani lady tapping her feet and playing the squeezebox placed a curse on my head as I passed by her Perspex burger stand.”
The main character says, and you believe him, that “I would rather be half-starved and wide-eyed than have my soul devoured by some corporate conglomerate like all the spray tanned, polyester-suited ciphers up in the slick serviced apartments.”
There is a plot, driven by events, “Rising sea levels make America's southern coastal regions uninhabitable and turn much of Spain into desert, Alberta and Sweden experience inflows of capital and immigrants.” As a result, there are “climate refugee camps” and some semblance of the welfare state, for there are social workers. Among them is another character who might be a “love interest” except the MC, like Ethelred, is unready.
She nevertheless engages the MC in a quest to find, perhaps to rescue, a former contact who had told her of the War Blanket. Was this a version of the human traffic known in America and Europe? But “you cannot find out about the War Blanket on the internet. Not even the deep web….You need ‘security clearance’ to get in touch with them. It’s… a little like a generated key. The… kind of thing you might use to gain access to an on-line bank account.”
The clues thereafter might not be clues and the “snakeheads” suspected of running the War Blanket might actually be benevolent. But the plot and the characters seem to lose coherence in the latter half of the book. They have certainly lost the fascinating manic quality of the novel's beginning.
The main character says, and you believe him, that “I would rather be half-starved and wide-eyed than have my soul devoured by some corporate conglomerate like all the spray tanned, polyester-suited ciphers up in the slick serviced apartments.”
There is a plot, driven by events, “Rising sea levels make America's southern coastal regions uninhabitable and turn much of Spain into desert, Alberta and Sweden experience inflows of capital and immigrants.” As a result, there are “climate refugee camps” and some semblance of the welfare state, for there are social workers. Among them is another character who might be a “love interest” except the MC, like Ethelred, is unready.
She nevertheless engages the MC in a quest to find, perhaps to rescue, a former contact who had told her of the War Blanket. Was this a version of the human traffic known in America and Europe? But “you cannot find out about the War Blanket on the internet. Not even the deep web….You need ‘security clearance’ to get in touch with them. It’s… a little like a generated key. The… kind of thing you might use to gain access to an on-line bank account.”
The clues thereafter might not be clues and the “snakeheads” suspected of running the War Blanket might actually be benevolent. But the plot and the characters seem to lose coherence in the latter half of the book. They have certainly lost the fascinating manic quality of the novel's beginning.
May 10, 2015
It is post climate-change Britain. The landscape is bleak and so are the people. There is a marked Asian influence, reminiscent of a rainy Los Angeles in ‘Blade Runner’. The nameless hero of this book doesn’t seem inclined to do much of anything, but when a boy in a refugee camp goes missing he is driven to seek the organisation behind the disappearance. After receiving messages through his ancient analogue television, he is pointed in the right direction by a series of meetings with mysterious people. Eventually he ends up in Greenland with his girlfriend.
This is a mysterious story, with no real explanation of the motivation behind many of the actions. There is no real resolution either. This may have been deliberate on the part of the author, and it adds to the tone of the story, though some may find it frustrating.
There is a lot of beautiful descriptive prose in this book, which was reason enough on its own to read the story. There is some weird use of punctuation, and the words ‘minute’ and ‘muscular’ seemed to crop up with some regularity, in contexts that I found strange.
If you don’t immediately pick up on the dystopian vibe, read it with an early Leonard Cohen album playing, and a large glass of bourbon to hand. That should do it.
This is a mysterious story, with no real explanation of the motivation behind many of the actions. There is no real resolution either. This may have been deliberate on the part of the author, and it adds to the tone of the story, though some may find it frustrating.
There is a lot of beautiful descriptive prose in this book, which was reason enough on its own to read the story. There is some weird use of punctuation, and the words ‘minute’ and ‘muscular’ seemed to crop up with some regularity, in contexts that I found strange.
If you don’t immediately pick up on the dystopian vibe, read it with an early Leonard Cohen album playing, and a large glass of bourbon to hand. That should do it.
December 15, 2014
A perplexing protagonist ...
War Blanket by Samuel Astbury is a dystopian fiction taking place in England and Greenland, in a world altered by climate change. My favorite parts were descriptions of landscapes and economic relationships (e.g. East-Asian boss - English employee). The unnamed protagonist and his girlfriend, Angie, embark on a journey, not to save the world but perhaps a part of it. Astbury has created an edgy world as per the following:
"I walk among them through the metropolitan boroughs on the outskirts of town: contorted faces, cheap tattoos, burger wrappers and weapon dogs. To my eye, those are some of the bleakest landscapes on God's fine Earth; post-industrial wastelands suffering from decades of poor education and misguided economic policies. The people are fed and watered, but they are utterly redundant ..."
It is often suggested that fiction writers focus on specific elements and characters, rather than abstract groups, to engage readers. Fundraisers for starving third world children apply this principle when they invite you to send your money for a specific child, not an abstract cause. In this book, the plight of climate refugees is generalized, as well as ascribed to a specific child. Unfortunately, it strains credulity to think a few minutes spent with one refugee child would create a bond sufficiently strong to cause someone to risk their life, or even spend plane fare to Greenland. We readers are offered this justification for an important part of the story.
This version of the novel is decently proofread and well-written. Here are two examples of Astbury's wonderful descriptions.
"A hacking cough cut through the glitchy IDM music and rainbow-coloured cigar smoke. Ritsuko's eyes darted to the far end of the bar and met those of an aging, yet tall and powerfully-built man with a shaved head and a straggly ginger beard."
"Emaciated angels with broad, smiling faces made out of sugar and x-ray emissions, and a pristine grassy plain, emerald green with brilliant blue skies."
The strength of the novel is in its depiction of dystopia, both physical and psychological. On the other hand, the manifestation of this dystopia in the main character is, for me, the principal weakness of the novel. The unnamed protagonist seems more swept up by events than a competent active participant in his world. A statement made by his girlfriend highlights this.
"Because you're an idiot. I don't know how you've made it this far in life."
The protagonist is an apathetic bloke more interested in club drugs (MDMA, ketamine), valium, vodka, and Marlboro Lights than being involved with too much of anything, including his idealistic girlfriend. It is a surprise he latches on to the mystery of War Blanket. Rather than have the protagonist chase down clues (excluding 'two solid nights of fruitless searches on the deep web'), he has the protagonist ask so many people questions, that he becomes the object of pursuit.
Astbury writes in poignant broad strokes, a style that will appeal to imaginative readers who like a certain flexibility with respect to details of characters and plot. I received an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
War Blanket by Samuel Astbury is a dystopian fiction taking place in England and Greenland, in a world altered by climate change. My favorite parts were descriptions of landscapes and economic relationships (e.g. East-Asian boss - English employee). The unnamed protagonist and his girlfriend, Angie, embark on a journey, not to save the world but perhaps a part of it. Astbury has created an edgy world as per the following:
"I walk among them through the metropolitan boroughs on the outskirts of town: contorted faces, cheap tattoos, burger wrappers and weapon dogs. To my eye, those are some of the bleakest landscapes on God's fine Earth; post-industrial wastelands suffering from decades of poor education and misguided economic policies. The people are fed and watered, but they are utterly redundant ..."
It is often suggested that fiction writers focus on specific elements and characters, rather than abstract groups, to engage readers. Fundraisers for starving third world children apply this principle when they invite you to send your money for a specific child, not an abstract cause. In this book, the plight of climate refugees is generalized, as well as ascribed to a specific child. Unfortunately, it strains credulity to think a few minutes spent with one refugee child would create a bond sufficiently strong to cause someone to risk their life, or even spend plane fare to Greenland. We readers are offered this justification for an important part of the story.
This version of the novel is decently proofread and well-written. Here are two examples of Astbury's wonderful descriptions.
"A hacking cough cut through the glitchy IDM music and rainbow-coloured cigar smoke. Ritsuko's eyes darted to the far end of the bar and met those of an aging, yet tall and powerfully-built man with a shaved head and a straggly ginger beard."
"Emaciated angels with broad, smiling faces made out of sugar and x-ray emissions, and a pristine grassy plain, emerald green with brilliant blue skies."
The strength of the novel is in its depiction of dystopia, both physical and psychological. On the other hand, the manifestation of this dystopia in the main character is, for me, the principal weakness of the novel. The unnamed protagonist seems more swept up by events than a competent active participant in his world. A statement made by his girlfriend highlights this.
"Because you're an idiot. I don't know how you've made it this far in life."
The protagonist is an apathetic bloke more interested in club drugs (MDMA, ketamine), valium, vodka, and Marlboro Lights than being involved with too much of anything, including his idealistic girlfriend. It is a surprise he latches on to the mystery of War Blanket. Rather than have the protagonist chase down clues (excluding 'two solid nights of fruitless searches on the deep web'), he has the protagonist ask so many people questions, that he becomes the object of pursuit.
Astbury writes in poignant broad strokes, a style that will appeal to imaginative readers who like a certain flexibility with respect to details of characters and plot. I received an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
October 3, 2015
Astbury introduces the pale, grey, caustic world edging towards extinction due to climate change and the numb hero trapped within it in the opening lines. From there on the chapters lay out a detailed portrait of ‘the industrial wasteland’ that the main protagonist feels is a ‘beautiful shit hole’. The 30-ish man is living a dazed - almost robotic - existence in a land past its prime that lacks the vibrancy, energy and brightness that he once knew. People are fighting over resources (water, land that can be cultivated, oil, even minerals). The southern coast of America is uninhabitable. Spain is a desert. Pakistan is under water (sea). There is a phenomena of ‘climate refugees’! Since North and South Pole’s ice is melting, its underwater deposits of gas and oil are up for grabs - which means more fighting. People have stopped normal human interaction and look for escapes - in bottles, cynicism, reliving the good old days in ‘Memories Online’.
The hero finds a purpose when he sees two strange unknown entities deliver the same message to him through the television. Yes, you read it right - an old man in pink fedora cap mimics his actions on TV before a cryptic female voice says ‘War Blanket‘ and the TV goes blank. A few nights later, a grey-haired woman delivers the same message on TV, adding ‘go to the centre town’. The hero has no choice but to investigate.
So from there on, it’s a matter of finding the truth about War Blanket, what it is, where it is, is it dangerous, is it a frenemy, etc.
My guess is that with drones and satellite technology, no place such as War Blanket would have been allowed to flourish, let alone escape the wrath of and usurpation by higher powers. The readers can make their own assessments.
But the real scary part - the nagging disturbing feeling that you will take away from the story: what the hell did the humanity do so wrong for it to end this way?
I received a free copy of the book in exchange for a fair, unbiased and non-reciprocal review.
The hero finds a purpose when he sees two strange unknown entities deliver the same message to him through the television. Yes, you read it right - an old man in pink fedora cap mimics his actions on TV before a cryptic female voice says ‘War Blanket‘ and the TV goes blank. A few nights later, a grey-haired woman delivers the same message on TV, adding ‘go to the centre town’. The hero has no choice but to investigate.
So from there on, it’s a matter of finding the truth about War Blanket, what it is, where it is, is it dangerous, is it a frenemy, etc.
My guess is that with drones and satellite technology, no place such as War Blanket would have been allowed to flourish, let alone escape the wrath of and usurpation by higher powers. The readers can make their own assessments.
But the real scary part - the nagging disturbing feeling that you will take away from the story: what the hell did the humanity do so wrong for it to end this way?
I received a free copy of the book in exchange for a fair, unbiased and non-reciprocal review.
March 25, 2015
I enjoyed the voice of the main character in War Blanket as he introduced his bleak future world. Some of the dystopian –ness of it was fairly subtle, and drew nice parallels to our own current society. I also really liked all the gentle humor regarding his job and his employers.
The book did suffer from quite a few typos, weird punctuation, and strange word choice (all the uses of “pace” instead of “walk,” for example, and the numerous repetitions of “minute” for “small”). I also got confused who was speaking sometimes.
Otherwise, the writing was pretty clear and sometimes thought-provoking, with really skillful descriptions and visuals.
I’m not quite sure what the point was, however. The main character gets a seemingly magic message spurring him to look for this War Blanket organization, mysterious and possibly sinister, that is causing a stir in refugee camps. When a refugee boy he and his girlfriend met goes missing, they set off to Greenland to find him and War Blanket. Then follows a slightly surreal goose chase. I thought it was going to turn out that the Greenland trip was actually just in their heads—some sort of virtual video game. Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the ending, but…I just don’t understand why the inciting message was sent in the first place, which makes the whole last two thirds of the book seem unnecessary. Maybe I missed something.
I did find it interesting what they discovered in the end about War Blanket, despite the fuzzy bits. The main character’s final interaction with the organization was cool. The details of life in the future were imaginative and interesting, and some of the travel bits had real texture.
Warning: some foul language
*I was given a free copy in exchange for an honest review*
The book did suffer from quite a few typos, weird punctuation, and strange word choice (all the uses of “pace” instead of “walk,” for example, and the numerous repetitions of “minute” for “small”). I also got confused who was speaking sometimes.
Otherwise, the writing was pretty clear and sometimes thought-provoking, with really skillful descriptions and visuals.
I’m not quite sure what the point was, however. The main character gets a seemingly magic message spurring him to look for this War Blanket organization, mysterious and possibly sinister, that is causing a stir in refugee camps. When a refugee boy he and his girlfriend met goes missing, they set off to Greenland to find him and War Blanket. Then follows a slightly surreal goose chase. I thought it was going to turn out that the Greenland trip was actually just in their heads—some sort of virtual video game. Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the ending, but…I just don’t understand why the inciting message was sent in the first place, which makes the whole last two thirds of the book seem unnecessary. Maybe I missed something.
I did find it interesting what they discovered in the end about War Blanket, despite the fuzzy bits. The main character’s final interaction with the organization was cool. The details of life in the future were imaginative and interesting, and some of the travel bits had real texture.
Warning: some foul language
*I was given a free copy in exchange for an honest review*
February 13, 2015
“This vertical city teems with algae, neon, glass, wet bamboo, pitchers of warm, shit beer, one-armed Eastern European barmaids, elderly Malaysian con-men dressed-up like Santa Claus, thread vein prostitutes rooting through the automated recycling bins.
That is one of my favorite lines of this book. It gives you a very concrete idea of the kind of environment the narrator is walking you through. The beginning of this book was very slow for me. It took the first three chapters for me to really actually get into the book and have an interest in the main character. War Blanket is a little bit dystopian and reminds me of Orwell's 1984. Because of the main character's drug use, I wondered if maybe the war blanket wasn't an actual reality and maybe he just had a really bad trip or hallucination.
I really liked Astbury's writing style. The imagery in this book allows you to really immerse yourself in the same world that the main character is in. I could almost smell the smog and ruin. The quality of writing is quiet enviable and what a lot of writers often strive for. Astbury delivers this story in such a way that it is very believable. The device that delivers the news about the war blanket was very clever to me and I thought it really said a lot about the world that we live in now. This book really makes you think about the world around you and whether technology hurts or helps us.
That is one of my favorite lines of this book. It gives you a very concrete idea of the kind of environment the narrator is walking you through. The beginning of this book was very slow for me. It took the first three chapters for me to really actually get into the book and have an interest in the main character. War Blanket is a little bit dystopian and reminds me of Orwell's 1984. Because of the main character's drug use, I wondered if maybe the war blanket wasn't an actual reality and maybe he just had a really bad trip or hallucination.
I really liked Astbury's writing style. The imagery in this book allows you to really immerse yourself in the same world that the main character is in. I could almost smell the smog and ruin. The quality of writing is quiet enviable and what a lot of writers often strive for. Astbury delivers this story in such a way that it is very believable. The device that delivers the news about the war blanket was very clever to me and I thought it really said a lot about the world that we live in now. This book really makes you think about the world around you and whether technology hurts or helps us.
May 9, 2015
A maelstrom of description in a shaky universe that changes minute by minute. This universe is anti-world. Non-world. A future world where all the negative tendencies—political and industrial--of today are realized in a new and dreamy unreality.
There’s the fleeting Angie who is either a love interest or not. The search for a Mrs. Abe. Despite intense flurries of description no sense of place is accomplished. Yet the energy pulses on. There’s a compulsive hurry, a thrust that starts nowhere and goes nowhere. In the vein of William Burroughs and Henry Miller a young man stumbles from one bad dream to the next. Awash in industrial artifacts I never felt an emotion—positive or negative---through the story. It rolls and rolls. A novel not beholding to significant or clear events. No launching beginning, no turning middle nor a clear finality. Not even an irony. No satisfaction. No tragedy, no comedy. No love found or lost. No cataclysm or evil source of suffering. Forget about the concept of protagonist and antagonist or even any kind of agon. State a mystery and there is mystery.
But the author’s energy propels one along. An enormous imagination fills each page. Certainly a payoff looms? There will be a spine to the tale missed earlier? An obscure buried thread that imparts wisdom or a way to better lead my days?
No.
But the energy is compulsive and unrelenting.
September 1, 2015
War Blanket takes place in post-climate change Britain. The author paints a bleak picture of life that is predicated on the pitfalls of today's world. Life has become a near solitary endeavor for the main character. Although he does not desire companionship he finds himself drawn to Angie, the sort-of love interest. Angie is a social worker who sees the daily human destruction of refugee camps that are over run.
The MC sees visions in old analog technology that brings him to the idea of War Blanket. Then Angie introduces him to a boy at the refugee camp also intrigued by the mysterious War Blanket and 'New North' furthering mystery surrounding the idea. When the boy goes missing the MC and Angie set out to find the boy and uncover the truth surrounding War Blanket.
Unfortunately, for me at least, the story falls short. The ending and much of the book remains unclear. Littered with beautiful prose and well-described scenes there doesn't seem to be a point beyond the first fourth of the book. I loved the idea of the story and the characters were interesting I just wish there had been some movement in the plot line.
The MC sees visions in old analog technology that brings him to the idea of War Blanket. Then Angie introduces him to a boy at the refugee camp also intrigued by the mysterious War Blanket and 'New North' furthering mystery surrounding the idea. When the boy goes missing the MC and Angie set out to find the boy and uncover the truth surrounding War Blanket.
Unfortunately, for me at least, the story falls short. The ending and much of the book remains unclear. Littered with beautiful prose and well-described scenes there doesn't seem to be a point beyond the first fourth of the book. I loved the idea of the story and the characters were interesting I just wish there had been some movement in the plot line.
July 28, 2016
Although it isn't quite the equal of 'Cloud Storage', this book features the same relentless pacing and amazing descriptive ability. It follows a somewhat more traditional narrative, and for me, in comparison, falls slightly short of Cloud Storage. However, the book is still vastly more engaging than anything else I have read in indie circles all year. I think this is evident from the very first page. I look forward to the next one.
May 8, 2015
This novel is a great example of the dystopian genre. It has captivating descriptions of the scenery and the author does a great job of making the energy and hustle and bustle of the world he has created come alive. The characters have real depth and I really enjoyed the witty epithets of the main character.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews