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This is a nuclear bomb of a novel. I could go any one of a thousand different directions trying to describe the reading experience that is "Perfidia" but each start feels false because the second I start to describe, it's suddenly wrangled and pinned down. This is not a book that should be distilled and if it is, it has to be all the way down past any descriptors to the base, glaze-eyed "wow..." or "incredible..."
The staccato rhythm of the sentences initially (like for the first 5 pages maybe) feels like a gimmick or the prose of a lesser writer but as soon as even one strand of the plot gets going you see that it's no gimmick but instead a bennie-addled tour guide pinning your eyelids open and strapping you to the front of a ballistic missile and lighting the fuse. It's almost hard to believe that this book is the product of a single human mind so massively stuffed and complex is it. Opening "Perfidia" is like setting off an entire shelf of fireworks in your brain.
Finally, Dudley Smith is permanently elevated into the pantheon: Judge Holden, Hank Stamper, Cornelius Suttree, Mickey Sabbath, Dudley Smith
What a book
The staccato rhythm of the sentences initially (like for the first 5 pages maybe) feels like a gimmick or the prose of a lesser writer but as soon as even one strand of the plot gets going you see that it's no gimmick but instead a bennie-addled tour guide pinning your eyelids open and strapping you to the front of a ballistic missile and lighting the fuse. It's almost hard to believe that this book is the product of a single human mind so massively stuffed and complex is it. Opening "Perfidia" is like setting off an entire shelf of fireworks in your brain.
Finally, Dudley Smith is permanently elevated into the pantheon: Judge Holden, Hank Stamper, Cornelius Suttree, Mickey Sabbath, Dudley Smith
What a book