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A review by anteus7
The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch
5.0
I inhaled this book and then let it sit in my headspace for a bit before trying to review it. I don't think I'm going to do it justice.
The Gone World does several things that scratch itches I sometimes forget need scratching. The book starts right off squarely in cosmic horror territory, which is one of the itches.
The opening is bleak, cold, lonely, and all the other words one might come up with to describe the sucking sense of loss at the burnt-out end of the universe. We have an agent of some kind there trying to figure something out and failing horribly, and I had no idea what was going on. I find that this is one of my favorite reading states: a state of information deficiency. Scratch two.
Scratch three comes in the form the agent herself and her job. I guess I like mystery-adjacent things very much and should read more stories with an NCIS agent (or other governmental/military-type law enforcement agent).
There are more, but structuring a review according to itches scratched is getting silly.
I love that the book started off with the horror and then moved on into some pretty advanced sci-fi stuff, which often has the result of diffusing the horror. In this case, no amount of advanced technology was going to head off the Big Bad, which became more and more clear as the story progressed (or did it?).
I had a lot of fun picking up pieces and figuring out where they fit. This is a book I will have to revisit. I'm going to go and look for all of Sweterlitsch's books now, thanks.
The Gone World does several things that scratch itches I sometimes forget need scratching. The book starts right off squarely in cosmic horror territory, which is one of the itches.
The opening is bleak, cold, lonely, and all the other words one might come up with to describe the sucking sense of loss at the burnt-out end of the universe. We have an agent of some kind there trying to figure something out and failing horribly, and I had no idea what was going on. I find that this is one of my favorite reading states: a state of information deficiency. Scratch two.
Scratch three comes in the form the agent herself and her job. I guess I like mystery-adjacent things very much and should read more stories with an NCIS agent (or other governmental/military-type law enforcement agent).
There are more, but structuring a review according to itches scratched is getting silly.
I love that the book started off with the horror and then moved on into some pretty advanced sci-fi stuff, which often has the result of diffusing the horror. In this case, no amount of advanced technology was going to head off the Big Bad, which became more and more clear as the story progressed (or did it?).
I had a lot of fun picking up pieces and figuring out where they fit. This is a book I will have to revisit. I'm going to go and look for all of Sweterlitsch's books now, thanks.