First off, let me say that, like Feed, this book is a part of a series, and because I’m a reading junkie, I’ve of course torn through a good portion of it. I’ve read 3 books out of the series so far and I’m pretty sure the 4th is kicking around the house here somewhere. I’m sure I’ll read it the next time I run out of reading when the library is closed. As to how many books there are in this series? I can’t rightfully say. A lot. This is a writer who seems to go quantity over quality all the way… but we’ll talk about that in a second.
So I’ll start by saying this was another recommendation from my Mr. Like I’ve said, he has a type when it comes to books, and that type is tall, dark and apocalypse-y. That’s kind of fine by me, since I’ll read just about anything, but don’t go into this expecting Sense and Sensibility.
Dies the Fire starts out with the whole world undergoing a “Change”. The characters in the book never find out exactly what caused it, so neither do we, but the most bandied about theory is that some higher being decided humans had gotten too big for their britches and needed to be taken down a notch. Whatever DID cause the Change, it altered the way that the rules of nature work so that most of the technology from the past 200 years doesn’t work. Weee!
Swallowing the Change whole hog takes more than a little suspension of disbelief, and I’ll admit, I think it was a little lazy on the part of the author to just be like “it happened, deal with it, I’m not explaining it”, but I suppose the rules of nature “breaking” shouldn’t be any more difficult to pretend than what we routinely accept from full-on fantasy books. Besides, it is a rather interesting premise. How screwed would you be if you couldn’t use Google, let alone your car??
Once past the
deus ex machina introduction, we get into the meat of the story. There are two main groups of characters we follow: Juniper McKenzie and her rag-tag band of pagan misfits, and Mike Havel and the family of wealthy business tycoons he was flying to their Oregon wilderness vacation home.
Both groups of characters are interesting and fairly well developed, but I found myself rather annoyed with Mr. Stirling during quite a few of the passages describing the pagan group. In his introduction to the book he gives thanks to friends or acquaintances who provided him with information on paganism, and in this first book especially it’s painfully clear that his knowledge is all second hand. I can’t claim I’m an expert on paganism either, but if I were attempting to write a novel, I certainly wouldn’t use details of a culture I wasn’t at all familiar with for one of my main characters. It comes across a bit as gauche cultural tourism.
The story itself is engrossing. Obviously there are plenty of challenges for both groups to face with the entire infrastructure of the world more or less collapsed, and they handle it in different and equally inventive ways. It’s easy to get caught up. The only problem is occasional bouts of immaturity in the writing. Most of the story is well written and flows well, but every once in a while it feels as if the story’s editor fell asleep at the wheel.
Over all I would recommend this series with the caveat to not expect a classic. It’s interesting reading with colorful characters, but be ready for the occasional urge to yell at the author to strike. Consider it to be the action-adventure equivalent of a cheap romance novel; cotton candy for your brain.
Especially Creative Broad 