Book review: Dreadful Skin, Cherie Priest

[tambyrd]

Dreadful Skin is wonderful in some aspects. Things Priest does well: nice prose, great tension within scenes, some truly scary shit. Jack is horrifying, all the more so because you meet him when he is sane and learn that he is, in his better moments, dreadfully aware of what he does when the madness comes over him. (Having lived through at least 3

Comments

[teriegarrison]

Oh dear. I've recently had the idea for an adult fantasy novel that would be told in multiple POVs. Now you're making me nervous. :-/

No fears!

[tambyrd]

Oh, but if multiple POV is done well, it's great! Elizabeth Bear (Hammered series at least) does this quite well -- it's a bit jarring at first, but that's more due to the pace of the story. The action was pretty jarring at first too. Once I got used to the pace, the various characters absolutely gripped me.

The thing is, in Bear's story, I always knew who was talking to me one sentence into their bit. In this book, I didn't know until they said something concrete to identify themselves, which didn't happen until a page into someone's narrative. It was the (lack of) characterization, not the multiplicity, I guess, that bothered me.

I hope you write that book -- while I haven't dug into your books yet Nishi & Karen (my trusted pre-readers, I actually read slower than they do) are quite into AutumnQuest and have Winter Maejic queued up here at home -- I'd love to see an adult book from you!