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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Some of you might know the queer horror podcast "The Magnus Archives". It's very intriguing and unsettling and you should definitely never listen to it at night. Why am I talking about the Magnus Archives when reviewing this book? Well, the podcast is centred around human fear, and it categorizes those fears into 14 entities, one of them being the Spiral. Now if someone were to write a book about the Spiral, it would be called "Du hättest gehen sollen" by Daniel Kehlmann.
The Spiral is the fear of madness, of losing connection to reality, of no longer trusting your senses. Time and Place become fluid, twisting and changing until the human mind cannot comprehend them anymore. Dreams, hallucinations, and thoughts bleed into this reality until they are inseparable. There is no explanation, no reason, no logic. Rooms rearrange themselves, hallways are longer than they should be, and the house is larger, not in height, but something else.
This book captures those feelings of uncertain terror, paranoia, doubts and despaired confusion perfectly. It slowly drags you in with subtle things, that seem a bit out of the norm but are easily dismissed, until, just like the main character, you realize you have been waiting too long inside a trap and now it's too late to escape.
Reading it will feel like a fever-dream and it will definitely leave you with questions and confusion and an unsettling feeling in your stomach that you can't get rid of for quite some time.
I can recommend this book, if you're intrigued by what I wrote about the Spiral and if you're okay with never really understanding what exactly is happening. Reading this book at night is something I would not recommend though. You can't exactly place where the fear is coming from, but you feel it everywhere, subtle and intangible, but very real.
The Spiral is the fear of madness, of losing connection to reality, of no longer trusting your senses. Time and Place become fluid, twisting and changing until the human mind cannot comprehend them anymore. Dreams, hallucinations, and thoughts bleed into this reality until they are inseparable. There is no explanation, no reason, no logic. Rooms rearrange themselves, hallways are longer than they should be, and the house is larger, not in height, but something else.
This book captures those feelings of uncertain terror, paranoia, doubts and despaired confusion perfectly. It slowly drags you in with subtle things, that seem a bit out of the norm but are easily dismissed, until, just like the main character, you realize you have been waiting too long inside a trap and now it's too late to escape.
Reading it will feel like a fever-dream and it will definitely leave you with questions and confusion and an unsettling feeling in your stomach that you can't get rid of for quite some time.
I can recommend this book, if you're intrigued by what I wrote about the Spiral and if you're okay with never really understanding what exactly is happening. Reading this book at night is something I would not recommend though. You can't exactly place where the fear is coming from, but you feel it everywhere, subtle and intangible, but very real.
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
fast-paced
3.5! Very house of leaves esq., would have liked it to be a little longer. Also just not the best translation in a book I’ve read. Still fun and terribly suffocating with its passages.
fast-paced