Raising Hell in the Nightside

Nightside #4-6

by Simon R. Green

a wonderful omnibus of Simon Green's bestselling Nightside series! contains Hex and the City, Paths Not Taken and Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth

Genres: Urban Fantasy, Fantasy, Fiction, Paranormal, Green

530 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Simon Richard Green is a British science fiction and fantasy-author. He holds a degree in Modern English and American Literature from the University of Leicester. His first publication was in 1979.

His Deathstalker series is partly a parody of the usual space-opera of the 1950s, told with sovereign disregard of the rules of probability, while being at the same time extremely bloodthirsty.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Doc Ezra · Rating 2 out of 5]

As much as I enjoyed the first omnibus of Green’s Nightside books, this set left me pretty cold. It basically falls to the same problem so many of these supernatural noir type series seem to have, in that it can’t resist raising the stakes every installment. It at least took Sandman Slim and Jim Butcher quite a few books to get into the wars with angels and killing primordial deities territory, but Nightside PI John Taylor gets there in book 4, and has basically gone so completely over the top as to become nearly a parody of the genre.

That said, the cast of characters is still sort of entertaining, though there are several that are a bit eye-rolling in their cliche. Razor Eddie and Shotgun Suzie are still pretty fun, for the most part, but I could’ve done without the Suzie/John love subplot (it may be a stretch to call it a subplot, as it basically manifests whole cloth over the course of the back half of one book). Full marks to Green for digging deep into various myths and legends to populate the nonstop freak show that is the Nightside, though.

Reading multiple installments packaged in an omnibus, however, reveals my biggest issue with the series, and why I’ll likely stop here rather than dive into the remaining half dozen or so installments: repetition. There are turns of phrase and miraculous last-second escapes that get reused every few chapters, and when I can start predicting the next few sentences of a book, nearly verbatim, I get a little bored. Reading them as originally published, diving in for a couple hundred pages every year or three? Probably not something that would’ve bothered me much. Reading one 3-volume collection and seeing all the same escapes, the same phrases, etc? Pulled me directly out of any immersion I had found.

[Robert Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's interesting, I've had this book in my library for a decade, long enough to have forgotten how it all turns out. But I've just finished all of the Dresden files (and I've got Glen Cook's detective series T'd up next). Anyway, on its own the Nightside series and these set of books in particular are an interesting take on gods and angels and other assorted supernatural characters. There's a lot of violence and set pieces and conflict as there should be in a "hard boiled detective meets LOTR" sort of book. It's fun and a decent read. The main character has somewhat of an inner life, but hews more to the traditions of the HBD in that he's the rock on which the world breaks, no significant changes.

Which is why I'd put the Dresden files significantly above this as literature. Dresden actually learns and changes. His friends aren't just window dressing or cannon fodder, they have actual inner lives and they change and mature. In fact some of the short stories go into quite a bit of detail on their changes. At the end of several of the Dresden books I had a tear in my eye and a catch in my throat. At the end of a Nightside book, I was satisfied but not moved.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first read Mean Streets with the short story featuring John Taylor I was interested in the character (if not the subject matter of the story) and wanted to know his history. So I picked up the Nightside books and started reading. Three books in I hadn't gotten the answers I was looking for about his mother and the reason certain "people" called him a King in waiting. I had checked this book out with the others, but wasn't really looking forward to reading it as I found Simon R. Green's writing a little repetative and tedious. I kinda picked this up as a "might as well give it a try" and found exactly what I'd wanted in the first place. This book combines three books (Hex and the City, Paths Not Taken, and Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth) into one omnibus telling John Taylors search for the truth about his mother and the journey he has to take to separate himself from his "destiny" according to her.

While it is possible to read this without having read the previous books (that's part of the tediousness) you don't get the full backgrounds of several of the characters and situations (time travel makes things interesting) if you haven't.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

includes
Hex and the City read 3/4/2005
Paths Not Taken
Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth 12/9/2006

and isn't that a LOVERLY cover painting from Matt Staiwicki?

[Jax O · Rating 1 out of 5]

Supernatural

[Nancy Raines]

Nightside Books 4-6