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ir85's review
Liked the premise and found some of the scenes very well executed (the entire sequence in Cambodia at the very beginning has an excellent eerie, surreal quality; several different encounters with mandalas (the toilet comes to mind especially) were also quite disturbing and memorable). But reading this novel very quickly became a chore due to the characters - I found them detrimental to my enjoyment of the plot: they felt very flat and not at all compelling or interesting to follow. At about the 60% mark I began skimming but even so the plot seemed to drag endlessly.
malkav11's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
lawrence_retold's review
3.0
Marc Laidlaw's an interesting writer. I first discovered him through his story "Leng" in [b:Lovecraft Unbound|26236506|Lovecraft Unbound|Ellen Datlow|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1441537804s/26236506.jpg|6696594], one of my favorite stories in that anthology, and only later discovered that he also wrote for video games. This (earlier) novel isn't as good as "Leng" for me — its explicitly sexual scenes, in particular, I found not up to par — but, the pacing is good and the book's climax is surprisingly satisfying. For a book in which the characters themselves are often unsure about which parts of their experiences represent reality, too, The 37th Mandala was remarkably not confusing to read. I found some discomfort in "mandalas" being the name of the supernatural beings, and felt (relatedly) that Laidlaw perhaps missed a big opportunity to have an Asian point-of-view character, so the cultural currency of this book is pretty much nonexistent; but, it drew me in nonetheless: I really felt like I *lived* with this book, on and off, for a year. I read somewhere that Laidlaw wrote it, in part, explicitly in order to train himself to be a better writer; as it stands, it is sort of all over the place, but, if "Leng" is any indication, The 37th Mandala did manage to accomplish its goal.
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