“When Zelda and her friends
first met, in college, they believed they had all the answers. They had figured
out a big secret about how the world worked and they thought that meant they
could change things. They failed. One of their own fell, to darkness and rot. Ten
years later, they've drifted apart, building lives for themselves, families,
fortunes. All but Zelda. She's still wandering the backroads of the nation.
She's still fighting monsters. She knows: the past isn't over. It's not even
past. The road's still there. The rot's still waiting. They can't hide from it
any more. Because, at long last, their friend is coming home. And hell is
coming with her.”
While I kind of liked this book, I felt Last
Exit was trying to say something, but using a sort of real-life issues
juxtaposition with some fictional evil made the book a chore to get through. It
became less an escapist novel and more of tale about a bunch of STEM kids
obsessed with their college days, the errors that they made and how doing what
they’re doing will solve all those problems. A Big Chill, in many ways, with
science fiction, fantasy, and horror thrown in. But no great music score.
While Gladstone is clearly channeling Stephen
King here – the book plays out like a extended riff on his Dark Tower series,
as well as IT (especially the part where Zelda sends out the letters to get the
gang back together, and we see their back stories)- it lacks a lot of the
charisma King brings to his magna opus universe. The vaguely designed explanation
of how these characters can jump between universes and we see many, but none
are really spectacular. Most are Mad Max style, so it made me feel he really
didn’t want to alienate certain readers by giving us a really weird world
(though towards the end, Ramon asks if any the “alts” Sarah had visited
contained alien invaders). They also have something they called a “knack,”
which seems like a heightened sense of knowing certain things, like Zelda’s
ability to alter probability. How these “powers” are developed is never clearly
explored or explained.
Beyond Ish and even Ramon, I found most of the
characters dull and uninteresting. Zelda’s fixation with saving Sal grows
weary. Yes, I understand Zelda loves Sal and would rewind, rework, replace the
world to save her, but it eventually borders on a mania I could not understand.
But I grew bored with all the characters bemoaning about their past issues, so
I struggled through the book.
One final aspect that did not help was the
dialogue. I mean nobody talks the way these folks do outside Buffy the Vampire
Slayer. In the end, It became a bit too clever and unfunny.
No comments:
Post a Comment