Regicide
Regicide by Nicholas Royle.
I got this on the strength of a review which made it sound much more interesting than it is. The premise - finding a map of a city that doesn't appear to exist anywhere in the world, and eventually ending up in that nightmarish city - sounded very promising. However, it just ended up being disappointing. Too much was unexplained and the whole book just didn't feel thought through. You can set up a story that ends up being all in someone's head, or all real, or even has enough of both to be satisfyingly ambiguous. But this was just a mess and promised far more than it delivered.
Still, it was quite short.
I got this on the strength of a review which made it sound much more interesting than it is. The premise - finding a map of a city that doesn't appear to exist anywhere in the world, and eventually ending up in that nightmarish city - sounded very promising. However, it just ended up being disappointing. Too much was unexplained and the whole book just didn't feel thought through. You can set up a story that ends up being all in someone's head, or all real, or even has enough of both to be satisfyingly ambiguous. But this was just a mess and promised far more than it delivered.
Still, it was quite short.