James Smythe, thoughts?

[Fried Egg]

Anyone read any James Smythe?

I couldn't find any threads about him so I thought I'd start one. I, not too long ago, read 'Echo' and was really impressed. I found out that it is actually the second instalment in a planned quartet but I felt it stood alone well enough.

Now I've picked up 'The Machine' which I plan to read next.

I often struggle to find new authors that I enjoy so it's always great when I find one that I do.

 

[tinkerdan]

I tried reading No Harm Can Come to Man. Could not make it through.
So I attempted to get into a few of his other novels to see if perhaps that was an exception to the rule.
It seemed to me to be more the rule.

His style seems heavily on the literary end which could work, even for me; however there were other issues including the necessity for a lot of punctuation that for this reader interrupted the natural flow of the narrative(if it has any)and his narrators tend toward stream of consciousness which for me created spurts and bumps and jerks and even often backtracking and it's easy to get lost just trying to figure out if there is any sort of progression to ideas through a single paragraph.

That's just my impression and there are a number of style issues that always get me in trouble when I try to critique these types of authors so I have decided to pass on doing reviews of their work.

And now I have already said too much.

 

[Fried Egg]

Well, after finishing 'The Machine', I am a lot less enamoured with him that I was before I started it. Although the themes of identity and memory usually interest me, I just found this story too bleak to really enjoy.

I guess maybe I'll just wait for the next part of the 'Anomaly' Quartet to come out...