(urth) If I already like ...

[David Stockhoff]

On 4/18/2012 5:35 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 4/18/2012 12:07 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>> From: Jeff Wilson jwilson at clueland.com>
>>> On 4/18/2012 6:59 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>>>> On 4/17/2012 10:42 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>>>>> On 4/17/2012 2:08 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>>>>> I strongly second the recommendation for Crowley, and I'd start with
>>>>>> /Little, Big, /although he's never written anything bad since 
>>>>>> /Beasts/.
>>>>>
>>>>> _Little, Big_ was a disappointment for me. Part of the novel is 
>>>>> urban,
>>>>> but the specks of actual fantasy come before and after.
>>
>> There's a brownie in the City, and what appears to be an animated 
>> statue, and the killing of a changeling (that eats hot coals), and a 
>> gateway to Faerie and a way to communicate to someone in Faerie, and 
>> a resurrected Barbarossa.
>
> None of that seemed to make a difference to the plot, being more along 
> the lines of conceits or dreams on the parts of various fallible 
> people. The concept of people shrinking as they go farther toward some 
> unreachable center of being so that there is room for ever more 
> incredible places and beings is fascinating, but if it is more than a 
> metaphor, I lost it in the character drama along with all the above.
>
> I might give it another shot sometime, but I'd need some kind of 
> really juicy spoiler to motivate me.

But juicy spoilers is exactly what you won't get out of Crowley. Not 
since /Engine Summer/ at least, where plenty of stuff happened that you 
could say was "cool." I wish he still did that in his longer works. 
Fortunately there are his shorter ones, but these I find to be 
irreducible. To summarize them is to do them harm.