A review by bexellency
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

2.0

Not what I expected and for me it started strong and just got weird.  Barely a novel.  Better described as interrelated short stories.  (Something I’d missed when reading the synopsis.). Although each without the snap and ending of a good short story.  I liked some of the early ones best - 30,000 Years Beneath a Eulogy, City of Laughter, Elegy Hotel.  I didn’t find a pig Son as memorable as other readers (had forgotten it until I was reading the end material author interview).  Things got weird for me in a life Around the Event Horizon - a singularity in his head, what does that even mean?  Both confusing and made me feel the way “films” do, like somehow I’m not smart enough to get it.  And while I might have liked a couple stories after that (Meloncholy Nights, Grave Friends) the level of weird stayed high (Before You Melt Into the Sea) and I just wanted to be done reading.  So not a book of speculative fiction I had expected from my apparently poor and incomplete reading of the blurb.  Rather a book about grief.  And I reject the Station Eleven comparison, as I loved that book.