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A review by aaroncbabcock
Hystopia by David Means
3.0
Probably 3.5 stars, really.
It's an odd book that has (rightly) been compared to the works of Robert Stone, Pynchon, and "Catch-22." Mean's prose is flawless and the work has an interesting frame of a book-within-a-book, but the potential of this frame is never fully capitalized upon. On some level, the work feels incomplete (mostly because we learn so little about -- and hear so little from -- the author of the book within the book, Eugene Allen).
That said, as far as alternative histories go, this is one of the better ones to come out recently in a genre that is pretty crowded and, frequently, a bit tired.
It's an odd book that has (rightly) been compared to the works of Robert Stone, Pynchon, and "Catch-22." Mean's prose is flawless and the work has an interesting frame of a book-within-a-book, but the potential of this frame is never fully capitalized upon. On some level, the work feels incomplete (mostly because we learn so little about -- and hear so little from -- the author of the book within the book, Eugene Allen).
That said, as far as alternative histories go, this is one of the better ones to come out recently in a genre that is pretty crowded and, frequently, a bit tired.