HRose/Abalieno > Recent Status Updates

"that all the people who were more than three miles tall should be put out of the house, as she would say, for fear they should bump their heads into Mr. Chandelier with his candle lights like dim stars in some dim, glassy heaven."

"whether he would stare at that wild, precipitous abyss which would stare at him."

Lada walks the Shortest Path.

"for in this mortal chaos where we now were caught, this constant fluctuation of distorted mirror images and principle of nothing but error repeating error like a mad, sad dream, no man knew where or who he was, and no man knew what he might become"

You wouldn't expect to find wish fulfillment in Vlad the Impaler... but here we are.

It's completely implausible and reads like a fairy tale, but it's well written and fun to read.

I read some pages of Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff and thought they were written so well that somehow I remembered I bought this other book, years ago, and decided to read first.

This becomes my main-secondary read. Characters are paper thin and a story told is episodic broad strokes, it looks like, but seems really good as well.

Now it feels like reading The Elephant Man.

Sometimes I think it's a joke on me, personally. An impossible object. That all existence is one giant prank.

There has been a plot twist through the last few chapters. It's very simple. So simple that I don't know anymore what I'm reading.

"That this was the garden of the blind could surely in no way have influenced my own clarity of vision in that amorphous, wet, clammy night of clouds and whirling fogs—even though, I have wondered ever since, what is the influence of place?"

A good chunk of the book done.

"The P’s were crowding upon her—Pandora’s bottomless box, pyramids, peninsulas, pebbles, prologues, pterodactyls. The P’s were crowding upon her—planets, Pythian games, polygons, Prussians, petunias, pseudopsias which are the delusions of sight, pseudosmias which are the delusions of smell, and there was no other guest expected through all that empty house."

Chapter 10 (next)

"She sat upright, the stuffed bird bobbing on her flower-laden hat, mechanical as consciousness, always in agreement with the dual-minded wearer of the hat"

This is now an exercise in concentration. I read 8 pages a day, but some days I have to skip. It seems doable. The book is like inside-out, everything that goes inside characters is exploded outwardly. A dreamlike reality, loosely connected with elsewhere.

"taking all the roads that went nowhere"

102 pages and chapter 5 done.

"sitting all day at my mother’s shadowed bedside, talking to a mad, sick lady who supposed her head was the only world, that nothing existed outside of her and her inflated imagination"

I think I found at least two common typos.

"Magic, action and romance in equal measure. It's utter shit."

(that's a quote from the pages)

This my side-read to Miss MacIntosh, for now.

"We should be grateful for every new day we had gotten through, for every sunset, for that was our only success in this world of failure, the fact that we had lived through another day."

"all the apples fell downward in all the orchards of this earth"

Done with chapter 3, onward.

"yet though she was herself only the deceived, enchanted head to whom had been transferred as through a glass tube the conspiratorial illusion of this unreal reality, the idea of a world"

There's a moment where some plot surfaces and then...

"that it was not simply illusion facing illusion?"

"whether the world had not always been this vast, supernatural joke played upon her or someone, poor, euchred humanity"

I'm now past chapter 1, but in the last page there were precise references to Weaveworld, Infinite Jest and Blue Prince.

That, obviously, were false.

"She had gone to bed for no reason at all, only that she had found the so-called real world unsatisfactory"

Read the first chapter and it will be enough for quite some time.

The overall settings seems very interesting. Other than that, we have another protagonist who's good at everything, and there are so many things in the writing that are so wrong to me that I could write SEVERAL pages for a line by line analysis of just these few pages in the first chapter.

"my mother, believing herself dead, that she had died long ago, had tried to kill me in order that I should be free of the influence of reality"

so far, it happens that I have to reread a line, but otherwise patience is rewarded with full comprehension.

It's like a wall of text of incredible poetry.

...and on and on and on.

"I had walked alone, searching, seeing only, though I sought for an ultimate harmony, the fleeting image, the disrelation, the chaos begetting the chaos, the truth as but another illusion, that which must perish, the rose which must fade, the heart which must stop."

Wow, just wow. I did not expect at all this being my thing.

It almost blends with 1Q84:
"It was spring, but it might have been winter still, another planet, the face of the dead moon."

From there the rabbit hole goes on and on:
"(Frozen lights) in the mist-shrouded, dark plain as if all the houses from which they emitted were travelling with us into an unknown distance from which no man returns alive."

672k wordcount, why not then?

On top of sheer length, this has the classic accessibility problem, despite what's claimed in the introduction, that it's not simple to parse what I'm reading.

Even basic description: "Her tiny face was covered with an artificial complexion like a mask too heavy, streaked with grey"

Streaked with grey?

DON'T BUY THE BOOK WITH THE ORANGE COVER!

https://loopingworld.com/2025/09/26/p...

The prologue was 130 pages long, out of 700.

There's a problem when you polish something way too much: it becomes straightforward, artificial and predictable.

LOL, he wrote this in the book.

"When you wait a few span or a month to hear a finished song, the anticipation add savor. But after a year excitement begins to sour."

I only start things, in a neverending cycle.

The writing is pretty good here, but artistically harmless.

Some Robin Hobb tones, but even more bubbly.

...project for an alternate timeline, to do a joint review of this and sequel. While reading Rothfuss in parallel.

Naive accusations of plagiarism are part of the appeal.

Funny that Virdi already wrote more words than Rothfuss. The real intent is to "re-dress" indian myths, likely being the LARGEST body of work known to humanity.

Chapter at page 97 is titled BRAHM, it's precisely what it sounds like.

- So, we've been under siege and are actually losing this battle. What shall we do?

- Let's move the city somewhere else.

"Ever since they had seen Krishna ride into the air on a griffin, the Magadhans had been obsessed with obtaining griffins of their own. It was obviously unfair. The Magadhans had a goddamned lion as their sigil. The Mathurans had a cow. If Krishna had flown on a cow with wings, Shishupal was sure no one would have given it a second thought. But a half-lion, now that was difficult to swallow for any proud Magadhan."

Doing micro updates because I can't cram much text here.

I'm not sure how the writer got the idea of starting the book with Krishna showing up naked at an important parley to decide the outcome of a war, covered in ... yoghurt? Point is, the writing shows occasionally some swagger. It's at least not boring but oscillates from okay to downright cringe.

I already got the second volume. I think I'll keep going.

Subtlety of characterization (and writing):

A military commander and warrior like none other. But he had no understanding of the virtues of moderation.
"I will smash his head to pulp with my mace!"

Those who joined the Silver Wolves discarded their old names and roles and adopted strange alter egos. There was an Arms, a Piety, and even a One Eye, serving under Satyabhama.

Is this Black Company?

Those whole 35 pages of the prologue have been quite dreadful, despite some vague echoes of Bakker (nonmen/inchoroi, carapace), but without any depth.

But the beginning of the first chapter is decent. The banter works better, and it's interesting to start with a siege to a big city, presented that way. I'm at least curious about what happens.

Prologue's only good because it throws the context and scale so wide.