Technically probably a 3.5? It’s very good but overlong and sometimes Adams feels like he wants to milk his research for everything it’s got. And there’s also a nagging sense of Karin being a literary equivalent of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl at heart and however much Adams tries to make her work fully, there’s still a nagging sense of her not really being fully believable or quite why she suddenly falls in love with Alan. But the best bits are incredible and strange and beautiful and Adams is a gorgeous prose writer

I also have a sneaky suspicion that Jonathan Carroll read this early on in his career and thought “this is very good but I can do it better”. And truly it is and truly he did