
(Disclaimer: English is my second language, so I want to apologize in advance for there may be mistakes in the text below. If you find any, please let me know so that I can correct it. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.)
Review Soundtrack: I suggest reading this review while listening to Dead Man's Hand, by Motörhead (Spotify, YouTube).
Lately, I've been binge-reading novellas and short stories, especially those published by Tor.com. Thus, I've decided to divide my reviews in several different posts, each one devoted to three or four books. To start with, today I will be talking about Patchwerk, by David Tallerman, The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle, and Pieces of Hate, by Tim Lebbon.
Patchwerk is a science fiction story about a machine that makes it possible to travel through universes, visiting alternative Earths. You may think that you have already read this kind of story a hundred times, but what is new in Tallerman's approach is the literary technique that he has chosen to convey the idea of changing realities. In Patchwerk, the multiverse machine begins to malfunction and thus the characters are moved from one dimension to another without previous warning. These displacements happen, most times, in the middle of a scene, and the reader finds that, suddenly, the names of the protagonists and the setting have abruptly changed from paragraph to another.

In The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle tries something very bold: an interrogation of racism through the work of none other than H.P. Lovecraft. The novella is certainly intelligent and well-written, but it didn't catch at all my interest and after the first half of it I really didn't care much about how it was going to end, maybe because I'm not into Lovecraft (or Lovecraftian pastiches for that matter). I'm probably wrong, though, because almost everybody seems to love the novella, so you might want to try it anyway.

All in all, two novellas (Patchwerk and The Ballad of Black Tom) with interesting elements, that I failed to appreciate completely but that you might like better than me, and another one, Pieces of Hate, that I recommend for its prose and setting. And soon, more reviews of novellas published by Tor.com. Stay tuned!
(You can also read this review in Spanish/También puedes leer esta reseña en español)
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario