soless's review against another edition
4.0
Weird. Vulgar. Hilarious. I want more of this. Much more.
nitessine's review against another edition
4.0
Its voice, finally, was the sound of ice breaking at the bottom of the world and all the starlight of a universe, which I had never known lurked far below me, rushing in and a drill, like the serrated, mile-wide cock of Satan, plunging into my people’s holy land.
If the above offends you, this is probably not something you want to read.
Royden Poole's Field Guide to the 25th Hour is a bit difficult to pin down. It's kinda like short stories except not really, and a bit like excerpts from a novel but actually no. The author himself describes the texts within as "floating chapters". The work also apparently is somehow related to the novel [b:The Hole Behind Midnight|12479437|The Hole Behind Midnight|Clinton Boomer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1314754598s/12479437.jpg|17463962], which I have not read.
It's urban fantasy of the kind that would be grim and gritty if the grime wasn't ridiculously over the top. To draw comparisons, Warren Ellis's [b:Crooked Little Vein|43717|Crooked Little Vein|Warren Ellis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402408304s/43717.jpg|2640005] is very close in tone. The role-playing game Unknown Armies has a similar theme of magic users being deeply fucked up people who (presumably) have no place in polite society.
As stated, this is not a collection of stories. Rather, they are vignettes and sketches, texts that get by on the strength of the prose and the jokes, not the plot that they hint and tease at but never resolve.
So, it's a lot of description upon description, as in the quote above, which was yoinked off a much longer paragraph. One of the chapters is nothing but weirdness for the sake of weirdness, descriptions ostensibly of groups of mystics, actually of insanity, sexual perversion, strange people and details that somehow manage to be incongruous even in the strange contextless dimension that these exist in. When actual outer beings are described, even moreso. It's like everything Lovecraft never said.
So, I don't really know what the fuck I just read, but I'm pretty sure I was entertained and I laughed out loud a few times.
Full disclosure: I received a free review copy from the publisher.
More...