A review by rainbowalcremie1995
Thirteen Storeys by Jonathan Sims

dark mysterious reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

 tldr; The real ghosts were the
capitalism
we met along the way. 
 
I wasn’t sure what to expect going into this book.  I definitely liked it overall, but it took me a while to finish it.  I bought the book a few months back, read the first few chapters, put it down for a bit when the pacing got a bit slow, and finally started over and finished the book over the last few weeks.  
The fact that the novel consists of twelve different characters’ separate stories that all tie into an overall narrative that concludes in the thirteenth chapter is, in my opinion, both a strength and a weakness.  When I was first reading the book, I had a lot of fun getting into the heads of different characters leading vastly different lives from each other.  However, since the characters are largely separate from each other until the climax, it also felt like some revelations kept happening over and over.  The book is not at all subtle with its anti-capitalist themes, and for certain characters, I felt like their chapters consisted more of reiterating those themes than focusing on the personal story of the character.  The middle chapters struggled most with this balance, and was around where I’d taken a break from reading the first time I read this book.  However, I feel that the chapters at the beginning and end of the book did a better job of giving its point of view character an actual arc in addition to contributing to the overall plot.  
  
I have two chapters I would consider my favorites.  The first is Carter’s chapter, which works as a great standalone story about an awful, awful person becoming a victim to something he created.  Something I love about that chapter is that
Donna is basically working as intended and taking over his life, creating someone to be a better person in his place if he won’t do it himself
.  I feel like the chapter is even more timely in 2023 than it was in 2020, with ChatGPT and AI generated art being such hot topics.  My other favorite chapter is Janek’s.  His is closer to the end of the book, so it's more tied to the main plot.  I love the imagery of him
breaking into the middle of the building, seeing the pipes inside, and deciding to join the bodies he’d been following
.  Another part of the reason I like this chapter is that Janek feels more personally connected to the harm Tobias Fell has caused than some of the other characters. 
Janek went through a traumatic work place accident similar to the ones the ghosts he’s following were victims of, and I found that to be a stronger character motivation than the vague concept of people suffering somewhere else.
 

I feel like the ending of the book wrapped things up a little neatly, but I didn’t mind.  I loved the scenes of all these different characters we’ve been in the heads of getting to interact with each other in a strange setting.  It might have been sort of anticlimactic and convenient to
have the characters just use the ghosts they’ve been haunted by to each thematically beat Tobias to death, but it was still pretty fun
.  As a note, I was reading the ebook version and listening to the audiobook at the same time.  I’d purchased both together, but the audiobook’s thirteenth chapter was different than the ebook in that the audiobook was told in present tense instead of past tense, and each character’s narration was in first person.  I’m not sure if that change is strictly for the audiobook version or if there’s another ebook edition that also uses those changes.  There were a few words and sentences added and subtracted in addition to the tense and POV changes, but overall, there weren’t any story changes, so you won’t be missing anything important regardless of which version you decide to read/listen to.  

As a last aside, I (like everyone else) listened to the Magnus Archives podcast sometime before reading this book.  I liked the podcast, but I never considered myself a huge fan of it, and I fell behind and never finished it, either.  If you’re a big fan of the podcast, though, I will say this book is pretty similar in tone and themes, with both using the real world horrors of capitalism and class divides in addition to the supernatural elements.  
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