zachari's reviews
364 reviews

there were some weird plot holes and inconsistencies especially towards right before the climax that I thought might be intentional in a shifting dream logic way but which I think were probably just oversights. we didn't really get enough characterization or explanation to make the murderer's motivations sense and the final red hearing is particularly confusing because they definitely also were doing crimes (destroying evidence, murdering) but that gets totally ignored. the whole thing with his boss was also frustrating; instead of subtlety laying the groundwork for an interesting twist or revelation, we just keep getting hammered over the head with how mysterious and morally unaligned he is, so that it's not really that much of a reveal when we find out his real identity. my reaction was essentially "oh, sure, why not, he might as well be that."

the whole time I was groaning because the text seemed so intent on making a hero out of Fool, the titular devil's detective, and of his profession, but was hoping this was a feint. I'm glad I withheld judgement; the last chapter makes it explicit just how hopeless and counterproductive hell's police are. 

overall I feel like this could have been an excellent novel with some more revision. i am still curious about the sequel and will try to read it if I can find a copy at the library. 

rating: somewhere between two and three stars

2.8 Stars

some very beautiful prose, some very intriguing world building, and some very regrettable heterosexual porn. we get a glimpse of three alien races, the brevity of which heightens their charm and excites the readers own engines of immigration, especially in the case of the architects of the maze. our glimpse of humanity is more extended and appears to be culturally frozen in the author's own late 1960s, with the summer of love having been institutionalized into liaison and marriage contracts with clauses for extended solitude and expiring pending renewal after a few years. the plot recreates the events of Sophocles' Philoctetes, with only three real characters in addition to set piece soldiers, drones, and sexually available women, all three classes of which get about the same amount of development. unfortunately our central trio -- a crafty elder statesman, a tragic adventurer and former ambassador to an alien world, and the innocent, naïve son of the adventure's friend, are all fairly bland and one dimensionally cynical, self destructive, and morally scrupulous respectively. the story feels only half developed, yet probably saves itself a great deal of tedium by being brief and segmented. the main exception is the epynomous maze, which doesn't have nearly enough scenes. see for example probably the most interesting scene in the book, the screen which displays a nun’s striptease turned nightmarific for Ned and motionless marching geometric figures for Charles. if only we'd had more of that instead of the same copy and pasted r/menwritingwomen treacle about the softness of feminine flesh every six scenes. 2.71 Stars.

baroque yet spare, clinical in its violence, the desperate brutality of Khaw's prose leaves me thirsty for more without feeling unfinished; on the contrary, I'm left feeling charmed by that special combination of  self-completion and open-endedness which keeps one up late mulling over the details of ghost stories long after the campfire's ashes have gone cold. in four brief chapters Khaw sketches just enough of a queer, cruel fairytale landscape for the reader to intuit horizons beyond its horizons and depths beyond the depths, only to send the whole thing up in an ambiguous inferno which leaves me blinking hard at the afterglow and struggling to make out just what it is I've read. fans of the  mytho-banal-horrific trifecta in Ken Liu's "Good Hunting" and Madeline Miller's Circe will notice resonances, amplifications and elaborations on certain themes and motifes. I look forward to watching where the literary subfield and Khaw herself go next in the wake of The Salt Grows Heavy.

beautiful, troubling, lovely, painful. that last chapter made me want to cry.

perhaps one of PKD's better, more cogent explorations of blurred reality, the observer effect, reality rewriting drugs, memory, scripture. extremely racist, misogynistic, self-conscious, dissatisfied--Jason Taverner and PKD's brooding narration are oh so rebellious and oh so white. there's a nocturn-Seusssean quality to the worlds Dick conjures in his books and in this one in particular, and though even his friendliest demons are never quite tame much less their tyrranic architeture hospital, the velvet nights against cut-out coin operated streetlights install a strange nostolgic yearning to have gone walking it's bleak streets my operating system can't quit shake.

and all PKD's creatures are demons, flitting about in their quibbs and shuttles against heavens, staring into each other compressed naked in the tight clasped marginalia illuminated by psychophossperesence, all their eyes droopy with thoughts of long lost paradise much-grieved with the special sting that comes with being based in hypothesis.