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A review by couldbestephen
MORI: The Lost Ones Vol 1 by Michael Seagard
2.0
I recieved this book as an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I ended up rating this book 2 stars and will not be recommending this book.
This is a cosmic story about a man who stumbles into an adventure much bigger than he could have ever imagined. Mori is a man down on his luck, His wife cheated on him and took his daughter when she was discovered. He moved to LA where he smokes and drinks himself to a slow death, with only a homeless man who likes to harass him and a neighbor who he has never seen to keep him company. When a voice in his head invites him to "commune," Mori thinks it's just a drug induced hallucination. He finds out it isn't. Cosmic fate and life purpose is explored in this pseudo-spiritual debut from Michael Seagard.
The best thing I can say about this is that it marginally reminded me of The OA, a show on Netflix. The power of community, shared vision, and multiple dimensions and how we echo across them are themes found in both pieces of media. The author's writing is solid, not the worst debut novel I've read. The plot is generally interesting.
The main character is terrible. Either the author was intentionally trying to write the most annoying kind of white, cis, straight, privileged white male to center his story around or this was a very bad self-insert on the author's part. I'm hoping it's the former. The way he views every single woman he encounters and interacts with them is very "men writing women badly." There is no sense that we are hearing from an unreliable narrator because whenever we are given the chance to see the woman as a full human, as a three dimensional being, we don't see it. The book can be very self-aggrandizing to the point of annoyance. You can tell the author thought he was writing fire when penning this almost 600 page debut that could have easily been 200 pages shorter. The views on spirituality feel very "white man writing about a religion he only knows about from reading about it on the internet from other white men," This book dripped with unexamined white privilege and weird masculinity.
If this book was approached as more of a third person perspective story rather than a first person logbook entry style story, maybe it would have saved it a little. What we are presented is a story that could be interesting if developed in better hands.
This is a cosmic story about a man who stumbles into an adventure much bigger than he could have ever imagined. Mori is a man down on his luck, His wife cheated on him and took his daughter when she was discovered. He moved to LA where he smokes and drinks himself to a slow death, with only a homeless man who likes to harass him and a neighbor who he has never seen to keep him company. When a voice in his head invites him to "commune," Mori thinks it's just a drug induced hallucination. He finds out it isn't. Cosmic fate and life purpose is explored in this pseudo-spiritual debut from Michael Seagard.
The best thing I can say about this is that it marginally reminded me of The OA, a show on Netflix. The power of community, shared vision, and multiple dimensions and how we echo across them are themes found in both pieces of media. The author's writing is solid, not the worst debut novel I've read. The plot is generally interesting.
The main character is terrible. Either the author was intentionally trying to write the most annoying kind of white, cis, straight, privileged white male to center his story around or this was a very bad self-insert on the author's part. I'm hoping it's the former. The way he views every single woman he encounters and interacts with them is very "men writing women badly." There is no sense that we are hearing from an unreliable narrator because whenever we are given the chance to see the woman as a full human, as a three dimensional being, we don't see it. The book can be very self-aggrandizing to the point of annoyance. You can tell the author thought he was writing fire when penning this almost 600 page debut that could have easily been 200 pages shorter. The views on spirituality feel very "white man writing about a religion he only knows about from reading about it on the internet from other white men," This book dripped with unexamined white privilege and weird masculinity.
If this book was approached as more of a third person perspective story rather than a first person logbook entry style story, maybe it would have saved it a little. What we are presented is a story that could be interesting if developed in better hands.