Name: Dead Set
ISBN: 9780062339287

Richard Kadrey

After her father's funeral, Zoe moved to the big city with her mother to start over. But change always brings trials, and money is tight. Zoe's only escape, as always, is in her dreams—a world apart from her troubled real life where she can spend time with her lost brother Valentine. But something or someone has entered their dream world uninvited. And a chance encounter at a used-record store where the vinyl holds not music, but lost souls, has opened up a portal to the world of the restless dead. It's here that the shop's strange proprietor offers Zoe the chance to commune with her dead father. The price? A lock of hair. Then a tooth. Then. . . .

A Novel

Dead Set

Kirsten Simkiss

This book was a gift from my partner. They have really enjoyed Kadrey's books, and they thought I'd enjoy this book more than I did the Sandman Slim books I read. And they were right! This is really more of a 3.5 star review, but I rounded down to nudge the counter closer to my ideal score.

So here's the things I liked about the book. I liked how the grief was described, as a tension and a numbness, a calm after a storm where nothing is quite right. I liked how the book felt somewhere between a modern fairy tale and a fable, almost reminding me of an Anansi the Spider story at times. I liked how the settings were described, between the decrepit Iphigene and the urban wasteland of the waking world. Kadrey seems to really enjoy the shady side of cities, which is really interesting because it's never sight-seeing or reverent. For example, this book takes place in the San Fransisco area, but you would never know that if it wasn't stated somewhere toward the end of the book. (It might have been said at the beginning too, but the end is fresh in my mind.)

And here's the parts I didn't care for. I often don't find Kadrey's characters to feel particularly like real people to me. His characters are not the worst offenders, for sure, but they're off enough that it occasionally takes me out of the story because the character does something so off from my experience of how people respond in real life. Granted, that might just be the particular subset of people I've interacted with, but I find it most commonly in two places: where adult authors are writing children and forget how characters of that age group behave and where male authors write the opposite gender. This book happens to be a little bit of both of those things in our main character Zoe and her high school friend Absynthe, and while he does very well most of the time, there were definitely some moments that made me pause. A lot of that has to do with writing outside of one's own experience, and the only way you get better at it is doing and learning from it. Another thing I didn't particularly care for was that there felt like plot threads that just got dropped for no reason other than they weren't relevant anymore. I also felt like the mixing of the mythologies was a little confusing, but that's just personal preference. (Ammut being Egyptian mythology, Hecate being Greek mythology, and Black Dogs being historically British mythology.) Again, nothing egregious, but it popped me out of immersion in the story.

If you're looking at reading this, it's a very smooth read. It went smoother for me than the Sandman Slim books did for certain.

Dead Set A Novel

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