Sci-Fi & Scary

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.

The Gone World was hard to write up a review for. On one hand, it was absolutely breathtaking in it’s scope and imagination. On the other, I never had the desire to read the book for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. So, obviously something wasn’t quite clicking there. In fact, even though I was super curious to see how he was going to wrap things up with Terminus, I had to force myself to sit down and finish the book at one point. And that just didn’t sit right with me because there’s no reason I should have been so blase about reading the book. It really is gorgeously written.

The ideas and imagery Sweterlitsch uses in The Gone World will stay with me for a long time. They’re nothing extremely new, but the way he tweaks them gives them staying power. The Vardogger tree, the cabin in the woods, Shannon’s scenes with Nestor. They all ink themselves upon your mind’s eye. The author has a way with words at times that paint the scene so realistically it feels like you can step right into it. I can see why so many people absolutely adore this book. I think that when I find time to give it a re-read (which I fully intend on doing) I’ll like it better the second time around. Every time I think about this book, I feel this sense of melancholy settle down around me thinking about what the main character went through.

Of course, it cannot go without mentioning that The Gone World‘s main character is a female amputee. Of even more importance, she is actually hindered by her leg. The author didn’t take the quick and easy way out and give her a disability that is overcome within a few pages. Her disability is something she deals with daily in the course of almost everything she does – and yet she still manages to do almost everything anyways. This is the type of disabled character that makes me cheer.

Overall, this is gloriously imaginative, definitely depressing, and filled with scenes that you won’t be able to easily forget. Gone World didn’t quite hit it out of the park for me, but I’m definitely more inclined to say it was a case of “It’s not you, it’s me.”