The West Passage
Apr. 1st, 2025 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe West Passage, Jared Pechaček, 2024 novel. I went through a few phases reading this - an early phase of "holy shit this is brilliant", a later phase of "hm, but there's rather a lot of it", and then a final phase of "... huh". Considered as a whole I think I come down on the side of it being awesome, but it's not a fast read. It's the kind of book that works well having no idea what you're getting into, but I know that's not much to go on, so, uh, a little triangulation: Piranesi, Tombs of Atuan, Dark Is Rising, Neverending Story, Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion. Also I'm sorry I didn't get my library hold until after Hugo nominations; I would have loved to nominate it for Best Novel and Pechaček for Astounding. I did go change my Locus vote for Best First Novel at least. Oh, here is one other potentially useful piece of information, there are illustrations/decorative chapter headings, and they're neat and relevant, so this is maybe one not to do as an audiobook.
Some big-ish spoilers: I really love the thing where familiar words are being used to describe something, but then there turns out to be some unfamiliar or uncanny detail, like the "rats" having palps or the "jackals" being green. Pechaček did a beautiful job with the slow introduction to the deep strangeness of his world and the little details that start to add up until the "ohh, we're like in a medieval illuminated manuscript/Hieronymus Bosch world here" revelation. The end felt a little inconclusive in a few ways, but it worked. (Some of that ambiguity was intentional, maybe all of it?)
Some big-ish spoilers: I really love the thing where familiar words are being used to describe something, but then there turns out to be some unfamiliar or uncanny detail, like the "rats" having palps or the "jackals" being green. Pechaček did a beautiful job with the slow introduction to the deep strangeness of his world and the little details that start to add up until the "ohh, we're like in a medieval illuminated manuscript/Hieronymus Bosch world here" revelation. The end felt a little inconclusive in a few ways, but it worked. (Some of that ambiguity was intentional, maybe all of it?)
