cavalary's reviews
269 reviews

It's all right overall, but too anchored in reality in all its action and meaning for my liking. I do my best to run away from reality in life; I don't want to bump into it in books too.
Also too "foggy". When I read, I always try to "make the movie" in my head. With this book, I had a very hard time doing that.

Funny, but also makes you think about a few things; most of what it says there rings so true... Makes you wonder "If it's like that, then why the heck am I in a relationship?", and if you answer "Because I love her/him, why else?" you passed the test. Funny how a funny book makes you sit and think afterwards, even though while reading it you can't really see a value aside from being funny...

Just like a toddler understands another toddler and a drunk understands another drunk, a crazy person understands another crazy person. The author obviously wasn't too sane when he wrote it, so, if you think yourself as sane, don't read it. But if you think you're (more than a little) crazy, like sci-fi and like to laugh, you'll love it.
It has no point, for the most part makes no sense and the things depicted in it are only likely to happen if you have the Improbability Drive on... But it's great. As I said, unless you think of yourselves as being sane, it's a great read.

Absolutely great. Skips the whole introduction part that is quite boring in most books and jumps straight into fast-paced action. Dazzling from start to end.
Before Lestat accepts Memnoch's offer, it's as thrilling as the best moments of the other books in the series.
After he does that, it's so thought-provoking that it may feel overwhelming. Anne Rice offers, through Memnoch's explanations, an incredibly logical and reasonable theory about the creation of the world and the higher planes of existence. Putting parts of this next to my own theories, I can finally see a reasonable role for a being assuming the role of the Devil. Of course, there are also parts that I wouldn't even consider as possibly true, but it's one of the best such theories I heard of so far.
And the end is baffling. I can see more than one way to interpret it and I'm very unsure which one to pick. What was Maharet's role in all of that? What was the real point of everything? Where did everyone go at the end? How many are left?
I know one thing: I'll miss Lestat, since as far as I know the books that come after Memnoch in the Chronicles are, just like all the books in the New Tales of the Vampires, stories "written" by David Talbot about the lives of individual vampires, and Lestat has almost no role in them.

I generally stay away from short stories, not to mention fairy tales, and this is essentially a collection of short stories that are at least in part inspired by well-known fairy tales. That said, while I can't give it a higher rating, I must stress that it has some great moments and overall it proved to be a pretty good read, even though I wished for one coherent story and a much better and more detailed description of the world in which the action takes place.
Do have to wonder how did it take somebody such a long time to make a game inspired by this, because it's excellent material for that. The author lists the ingredients for potions and their effects, places and conditions where some of them grow, all sorts of monster types and the abilities of some of them, the Signs used by witchers, their more unusual physical abilities... The scope is narrow, but the amount of detail offered within the confines of said scope is significantly beyond what could be expected from this format.

Though this time it's presented as a proper book, the structure still has something of a short story feel to it, jumping to certain largely self-contained scenes and playing them out. They're connected and it creates a story from them, but it's not quite right and there's still little actual world building, despite the author giving the impression that he really knows what he's going for.
That said, it does manage to touch upon a fair number of important issues and contains brilliant moments. Often said moments show up in dialogues, which certainly seem to be the preferred means of presenting the action and usually do it wonderfully, with added witticisms that make it an even better read.