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I picked this up because it was mentioned in conjunction with Chouette and it has had me riveted with its razor sharp prose from the start. If she keeps up the mood and quality and energy that this starts with, it’ll be phenomenal.

I just want to shout out to the graphic design dipshit who produced this cover, making the book look like a stock shoot ‘em up tough guy cop-who-doesn’t-play-by-the-rules action thriller instead of a magic is real/horror/police procedural/comedy. I’d probably have started this book sooner (‘twas on my to-read shelf for like two years and I’m loving it) but you fucked me over, dumbass who didn’t read it.

Holy shit has it taken forever to get through this one. Reading it to the teen and let me tell you, we did a big old skip over the [SPOILER BLOCK] scene near the end because...c'mon, I'm not reading that...

Some pretty funny old Tory griping by the narrator-voice in this novel about how put-upon the landed classes are and how some of them are cracking good fellows, what?

The first time I read this I was in my twenties and I loathed every bit of it. Now as I am rounding the corner into the second half of Roth's output, twenty some years later, I wonder how age will have affected my opinion.

As a critic once remarked about a B movie, there's too much plot getting in the way of the story. It's fun but it's taking a lot of information to tell the story. Are they stone, gas, animals, human, angels--what? All and more.

Another go-through of this rather pertinent classic.

Listened to the audio of this last year and now reading it to the kid.

An early dystopian fiction in which a ruling class oligarchy continually grinds down labor using violence and the power of the government to oppress the people -- you know, fiction...

This is maybe the fourth or fifth time re-reading this to the kid.

Folks, I gotta say while the whole premise is a bit ludicrous (huge tectonic plate shifts level much of Gotham and the federal government abandons the city to its fate), reading a story of a huge, epic disaster and the hopelessness and challenges of fighting back both against the forces of darkness and one's own inner dark despair is rather fitting at this point.

The talent to write good science fact isn't the same for science fiction & instead of saying someone flipped through TV stations & saw "crappy soap operas" or some common language phrase, Sagan has his protagonist flip past "execrable daytime serials." In place of "green" he'll use "verdant," or "tutelage" rather than "teaching," & other offenses against the sound advice of Strunk & White's to use simpler words.

The talent to write good science fact isn't the same for science fiction & instead of saying someone flipped through TV stations & saw "crappy soap operas" or some common language phrase, Sagan has his protagonist flip past "execrable daytime serials." In place of "green" he'll use "verdant," or "tutelage" rather than "teaching," & other offenses against the sound advice of Strunk & White's to use simpler words.

I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I've been enjoying this book. It's a tad heavy on the early American school of uplifting literature, but take it for its time.

I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I've been enjoying this book. It's a tad heavy on the early American school of uplifting literature, but take it for its time.

A pip as always.