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Apocalypse Now Now (2013)

by Charlie Human(Favorite Author)

3.72 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1780891318 (ISBN13: 9781780891316)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Century

review 1: A brilliant first novel that hooks you in from the first paragraph. The first person teen narrator has the smart mouth of a Veronica Mars or Buffy at their best, but with a dirtier twist. There's drugs, monster porn and pre-op supernatural trannies on illegal dwarf hormones - and that's just the good guys. These sorts of urban fantasies need a darker hook to rise above the teeming mass of formulaic novels in the genre. The Cape Town environment provides this with it's nasty history of genocides and apartheid. The ingenious inserts between the chapters such as the character's psychiatric reports add a meta-textual PoMo element that pokes fun at the structure and blurs the reliability of our narrator. "Is this real, or am I mad" is a tried and tested trope, but Charlie Huma... moren manages to walk this tight-rope act and perform a few novel tricks along the way. I can't wait for the next offering from this guy!
review 2: Unfortunately the title is the best thing about this book. I wanted to love it, but I couldn't: it's riddled with plausibility problems (forget the supernatural stuff, I mean basic human behaviour) and beyond flimsy plotting. It's full of gaming references and that is what it most reminded me of – an RPG in which events follow, not so much true life logic, as the bare minimum of logic required to point players toward the next big action fest. Nobody in this book ever needed to be convinced of anything, everything was taken at face value. Lazy, and I ran out of goodwill long before the end – which, by the way, was just more by-the-die-throw hackathon and precious little conveying of what was actually at stake. less

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