Brett Alexander SavoryReseñas

Well, that was...weird.

To be honest, I would expect nothing less from a story that escaped the moist thing in Brett Savory's skull. If you read In and Down, you know what I'm talking about.

But this novel is a completely different ...okay, I was going to say different animal, but that's not right...completely different machine. The novel is long on action, and quite frankly, this is where the book sings. The reader is thrown into it at the beginning, then for an extended period toward the last third of the novel as well.

Overall--and I'll be the first one to say this is not my standard line--while I often kind of wondered what the hell was happening, I quite enjoyed the novel. It sort of felt like David Lynch and Michael Bay came together to create the birth of Iron Giant by way of District 9 without the aliens. Sort of.

There were three things, however, that lessened the story for me.

The first was, as other people mentioned, the lack of explanations. Don't get me wrong, I'm not the reader that must have everything spelled out, and had it been a single plot point, I could get past it, but there was just so much here. Why do some people have this lead thing going on? Why, if they don't want the lead-suckers to ascend, do they essentially force them to get shot? Why does the hospital know about them when no one else remembers them? Why do some turn into ghosts? And so on...

Toward the end, Savory had to do some internal dialogue on Henry, but it came across as a touch melodramatic and awfully tell at times. It's a minor quibble, but it's there.

The final thing? The last page or so. I won't spoil it, and I think I may have a take on it, but overall, if taken literally...then no. But, like I said, I have my own take on it, that lessens the absolute disregard for the laws of the physical universe.

Would any of this stop me from reading additional Savory offerings? Hell no. Like I said, the stuff that springs from that moist tissue of his is always interesting, and definitely something different from the usual fluff. Even if his writing falls flat (which I haven't read yet, to be honest), it's still, at least, a grand experiment in trying to give the public something different from the usual pablum.

This isn't a book I would normally read, but I tend to now run in the same circles as the author, and bought this book when we were in side-by-side booths selling our wares.

I rode this novel like a rollercoaster. I truly enjoyed the first half, even though it felt much like a good portion of it was dream sequence (a writing trick I despise). Then, the dream sequence part seemed to take over and I found I wasn't enjoying the story as much, even though I realized it was less dream and more Alice in Wonderland, albeit through the twisted mind of the author.

In fact, after going through a series of scenes--with more to come--where it seemed the protagonist was more of a pinball pinging from place to place, meeting different people for no apparent reason, there was a quote that I flagged from the book that, at that particular moment, seemed to echo my state of mind:

Michael doesn't have the patience for these kinds of conversations anymore.

However, within a few pages of that quote, the novel seemed to course correct and I enjoyed it again. I didn't think the revelations at the end were earth-shattering, but they were logical and I saw the work the author put into building to these points.

I guess sometimes you just need to see the whole to appreciate the parts along the way. There's a part of me that still believes this might have been better as a shorter novella, but overall, with the Alice in Wonderland overtones and the David Lynchian undertones, it's absolutely worth the read.

What surreal looks like on steroids.

As usual with short stories, only a few were interesting. Quite a few here were dull, frankly. I only read it for John Park's Nightward, really (it landed squarely in the interesting bucket btw). Heat Death (Patrick Johanneson), Flight of Passage (Jon Martin Watts), and One Nation Under Gods (Jerome Stueart) were also kind of interesting.

A PERFECT MACHINE by Brett Savory, jumps right into the life of Henry Kyllo, a Runner, in the alternate world where every night he is chased by Hunters, who constantly fill his body with bullets, only for Henry to miraculously and quickly heal up and be ready for his next run. There is a mystic and reverent quality to the whole process, with Henry and the other Runners suspecting there is a larger purpose, though none of them have the real desire to inquire further.
Savory drops the reader right into the story and doles out nuggets of backstory to keep the reader interested without slowing down the exciting building to the climax of the book. While it is never fully clear why this Runner/Hunter situation is going on or how anyone became involved, it quickly becomes irrelevant because as the reader, you just want to see what happens to Henry and those around him. The story builds and builds to the climax with a whopper of an ending. I found A PERFECT MACHINE a quick, fun read that I had a hard time putting down.
Brett Savory's prose and ability to build the suspense helped A PERFECT MACHINE one of my favorite read in 2016 and I implore others to pick it up and enjoy the book like I did.
Thank you to Angry Robot Books, Brett Savory, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Just how this book ended up on my iTouch is something of a mystery to me, but it was there and I'd read everything else, and it was the middle of the night and I couldn't sleep, so I figured what the heck. A few minutes later, I stopped, looked back at the title and author, and tried really hard to figure out where this book could have possibly come from, because, um, wtf? A guy is sitting in his kitchen, minding his own business, and a pig comes sailing through the window? A live pig? Right. Then he starts checking the thermostat and it is pretty clear that he must live in hell. Oh, and the pig sits down and helps itself to his cereal, sitting upright in the chair and using the spoon. That's before things really get odd.I have no objection to a few fnords, but I generally know what I'm getting into. I suppose that when a novel apparently puts itself onto your e-reader, you just deal with whatever happens.So maybe I shouldn't be complaining about the fact that there isn't exactly a happy ending, because the ending isn't as unhappy as it could have been. But I LIKE happy endings. In fact, I have a thing about them, in that I tend to choose my reading with a very strong preference for them. That's one reason I'm unlikely to be reading any more Neil Gaiman (I know, I know, he's such a good author - but he's depressing as hell, too).Let's be honest here: Savory is not Neil Gaiman, and there wasn't a really happy ending. The ending didn't wholly suck as much as it could have, but there wasn't any goodness and light. Or redemption. Or reward. No love. Just - blah.So I don't know what else Brett Alexander Savory has written, but I probably won't be looking too hard at any of it. The book did keep me reading for about an hour and a half, though, so Savory did better than many other authors could. Kudos for that!I know he put this novel, at least, out under a Creative Commmons license, according to the copy on my e-reader. I don't know if any of his other material is licensed that way or not, but I give him thumbs up for being part of the CC movement.

Published by The Fix
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