The Electric Church - Jeff Somers

The Electric Church by Jeff Somers is one of the rare books that I knew absolutely nothing about before I read it: hand't heard of the author, hadn't read a review, hadn't heard any hype, which is quite a nice experience.

What The Electric Church has in buckets is style. Everything oozes style, the setting, the prose, the characters. The style overwhelms everything. And if you wanted to explain the style it is sort of post(ish)-apocalyptic cyberpunky.

The novel starts with some interesting action, and an interesting setting. Unfortunately things get repetitive quite quickly. The plot tries to drive forward, and kept me turning the page, but by the end it all felt rather empty. There was a lot of action, but that's about all. The ideas were more or less all set out in the first chapter and never developed. The setting can be summed up in a sentence. And apart from one twist near the end which I didn't (couldn't?) guess the plot is almost a Doctor Who episode.

The story is written in first person, which provides some immediacy, but gets tiring quite quickly. There's only so many times I want to hear about how bad the world is or how nasty the cops are, it's all very repetitive. And the main character swears incessantly, there's probably more uses of the word 'fuck' and it's derivatives than I have read in any book since Trainspotting, which again, becomes boring.

The action does reach a crescendo, but one which would be more suited to a Hollywood action film than a novel, lots happening but not much fun to read.

The epilogue chapter was irritating, all it did was set up a sequel. As for the appendix, I didn't even bother reading it.

So, disappointing, which is a shame, because I wanted to like it.

Here's the official website .