Elise reviewed Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall
Just Read Moby Dick
2 stars
This should be a fantastic book. I should be singing it's praises from the rooftops. You've got incredible source material, some of the strongest in the english language, a very fun spin on it that at least on paper is pushing all my buttons- cyberpunk, sapphics behaving poorly, body modding, obsessive desire, melancholic introspection- and writing skill that, at times, seems to deliver... but most of the time it shoots itself in the foot.
Number one with a bullet problem with this book: anytime things get a little bit expository or reflective, the narrator feels the need to apologize for that, like the book itself is sorry for existing, for trying to do something interesting, and inventive, and that would have totally sucked me in if not for that. It totally shatters my immersion, takes me out of the text, makes it feel like there was a punch-up writer involved …
This should be a fantastic book. I should be singing it's praises from the rooftops. You've got incredible source material, some of the strongest in the english language, a very fun spin on it that at least on paper is pushing all my buttons- cyberpunk, sapphics behaving poorly, body modding, obsessive desire, melancholic introspection- and writing skill that, at times, seems to deliver... but most of the time it shoots itself in the foot.
Number one with a bullet problem with this book: anytime things get a little bit expository or reflective, the narrator feels the need to apologize for that, like the book itself is sorry for existing, for trying to do something interesting, and inventive, and that would have totally sucked me in if not for that. It totally shatters my immersion, takes me out of the text, makes it feel like there was a punch-up writer involved that was worried I wouldn't keep reading if the book didn't make fun of itself, that I couldn't stand a little self serious moodiness. That's to say nothing of the constant lampshading for the word 'sperm' as shorthand for spermaceti that, if I simply had time to take it in and absorb it on my own, I wouldn't have noticed!
This book did not respect me as a reader.
When it's not apologizing for itself, Hell's Heart tries so hard to win the reader over. moving depictions of strong and beautiful and broken people, in an impossibly difficult place, doing impossibly difficult things. Images of which that feel so reminiscent of people I have known, people I have loved, people whose hearts I pierced and whose hearts I wanted to pierce. Beautiful, harsh vistas, that we as the audience and our narrator stare out at and ponder, where the cruel realities of capital that seem inescapable, the struggle against so many things to eke out something decent, and the struggle of the captain to win out against the impossible, all play out against. So much that, if the author or editor or whoever would just let me soak in, I would have had a higher view of this book.
Unsorted thoughts: I had trouble visualizing the Leviathans in my mind's eye, but I'm not sure if that says more about the writing or about me as a reader. The sex, even though it mostly happens off page, was very punchy when it wasn't. The vision of the cyberpunk hellscape imagined herein- and this is more and more a problem with all cyberpunk these days- seems a little quaint in our current year, with how horrible things are in our not cyberpunk world.
Final thoughts: Alexis Hall tries hard but comes up short when they need to trust their audience to stay with them.