Scan barcode
A review by sisteray
The Sea of Ash by Scott Thomas, Mike Davis
3.0
Three characters from three different timelines discover spooky stuff. It's all structured like a classic M.R. James story. Only the author gets a little 1001 Nights on this and has the current character researching a center character who is in turn researching another character. Wheels within wheels.
I don't know the author's motivations, but this book felt like over the years Thomas read classic Victorian and early 20th century ghost stories and felt like he had to sort what he loved from what he didn't. To me, it feels like he was frustrated by their verbosity decided to lean into the peak moments of weirdness. I applaud the effort, it is successful, but he also made choices that left his structure rather exposed.
The novella is boiled down to tight vignettes where a chapter will have the cool short story idea and then the characters are led to the next short story idea in the next chapter. So, you get episodic disjointed elements where characters don't feel like they have agency and are just there for you to see the next cool thing. Go here, do that, see this whacked out thing. Even the resolution, took power out of the hands of the subject of the book, literally.
As a result this book kind of felt like an exercise. There is a cohesive story throughout the whole piece, and I really did enjoy it, but it felt so much like he was riffing off of other people that it was like he was doing a sequence of cover songs. Something like how a tribute band can be good, but they are still a tribute band.
The three main characters operated in near isolation so they just wondered around where the plot called for them to be. It was hard to feel anything about them as they didn't really interact with other people to reveal much about themselves, nor did they seem to have much motivation other than to do the things that the author said for them to do. The dialogue that was there wasn't great, so I guess it's better to not have much of it, than inject it into the story and make it worse.
BUT, the stuff that happened was indeed cool. There were lots of really fun moments in this that will likely stick with me for a while. The structure was daring to have three parallel stories. And it's a really short novella so I easily can forgive its weaknesses.
I don't know the author's motivations, but this book felt like over the years Thomas read classic Victorian and early 20th century ghost stories and felt like he had to sort what he loved from what he didn't. To me, it feels like he was frustrated by their verbosity decided to lean into the peak moments of weirdness. I applaud the effort, it is successful, but he also made choices that left his structure rather exposed.
The novella is boiled down to tight vignettes where a chapter will have the cool short story idea and then the characters are led to the next short story idea in the next chapter. So, you get episodic disjointed elements where characters don't feel like they have agency and are just there for you to see the next cool thing. Go here, do that, see this whacked out thing. Even the resolution, took power out of the hands of the subject of the book, literally.
As a result this book kind of felt like an exercise. There is a cohesive story throughout the whole piece, and I really did enjoy it, but it felt so much like he was riffing off of other people that it was like he was doing a sequence of cover songs. Something like how a tribute band can be good, but they are still a tribute band.
The three main characters operated in near isolation so they just wondered around where the plot called for them to be. It was hard to feel anything about them as they didn't really interact with other people to reveal much about themselves, nor did they seem to have much motivation other than to do the things that the author said for them to do. The dialogue that was there wasn't great, so I guess it's better to not have much of it, than inject it into the story and make it worse.
BUT, the stuff that happened was indeed cool. There were lots of really fun moments in this that will likely stick with me for a while. The structure was daring to have three parallel stories. And it's a really short novella so I easily can forgive its weaknesses.