Liminal States

My introduction to Liminal States was having one of my friends tell me that they strongly disliked the ending but that I should read it because they would like to hear my opinion.  Oh, and it was a pretty good ride up until that ending.  Intrigued, I made some time in my reading schedule and gave it a try.

Zack Parsons wrote what is basically a trilogy in one book.  There are three clearly defined parts with the characters that do overlap having gone through significant emotional changes through the parts.  The first part is a western, and while it is a little unusual for the genre, it has a lot of the western tropes including a sheriff's posse and a train robbery.  The second part is a 1950's detective story, once again a little strange but with many of the appropriate cliches.  The final part is set in 2006 and is just basically an action thriller.

While I try not to discuss plot elements of the books I talk about on here, since the back cover gives away the following point and the book sounds very disjointed without it... One of the main characters in the book is an outlaw who discovers a secret way to be immortal.  Because he discovers this, and some of the other implications that this creates, lead to significant divergences from our timeline, so the book takes place in an alternate history, hence the science fiction label.

The book is extremely graphic in parts.  For example, in the aforementioned train robbery, the train gets derailed.  The book goes into detail describing how many on the train die.  In then goes on to talk about how the derailing upset a wasp nest and how those wasps go and sting the survivors.  The author just seems to enjoy writing about that sort of thing.  Though it makes certain sections seem like the literary equivalent to a Saw movie.

You are probably wondering how I liked the ending.  It was certainly unexpected. There is a point where, as the reader, you realize that there is no way that it can end up the way you had been expecting.  I do wish certain aspects of the end had been changed, but overall I was satisfied.  The real problem with it was that the third person limited narrative left a lot of things unexplained and beyond that, there seemed to be quite a few loose ends that were just dropped.  While this did make the book more unpredictable, it seems like there was a lot of narrative possibility that was just wasted. 

Overall, the book is certainly interesting and while it is definitely a lot more science fiction than it is horror, there are some horror themed aspects to it.  Honestly, there are parts of this that will appeal to fans of almost any genre.  However, as a whole, it would have benefited from a little more smoothing.  I would give this book a 84%.

NOTE: This book is part of a "alternate reality narrative" and there are a lot of multimedia things including a related short story (it takes place entirely before the book, but it does not matter at all to the plot until the third part) on liminalstates.com.