Written by Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere is an urban fantasy novel that sometimes amuses with its whimsical world but it’s constantly dragged down by its annoying protagonist. Offering a funny but problematic story, the novel is far from being one of the author’s best works.
Neverwhere accompanies Richard, a young English man who lives a quiet life, pretending to be happy with his office job and his abusive girlfriend. One night, however, he comes across a mysterious girl wounded in the street and decides to help her, to the protests of his girlfriend, Jessica. The next day, Richard realizes that having helped that girl may have cost him dearly: now, no one else in town seems [...]
At a time when the current president of the United States is known for frequently making xenophobic statements, a work like American Gods becomes even more relevant: by presenting a pluralist America, Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy novel unveils the hypocrisy and monstrosity of those positions, tracing an overview of the multiplicity of peoples and beliefs that make up the United States of America.
The protagonist is called Shadow, a taciturn man of few words, who receives an unusual proposal as soon as he finishes serving his sentence in prison: to work as a security guard for an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. Traveling with his new employer across the [...]
The debut novel of Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky, blends fantasy with sci-fi, putting witches, magical trees, talking birds, mad scientists, time machines, and doomsday devices all inside the same story, but with mixed results: the fantastical elements can impress us with their creativity, leaving us with a feeling of wonder, but they also end up drawing too much attention to themselves, sometimes hiding the touching love story that should have been the focus of the narrative.
The novel has two main characters, Patricia and Laurence, and starts to follow their point of view when they are just kids meeting each other at school, right after having life-altering [...]
Written by Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs is a great urban fantasy novel, building its themes around religion, persecution, and war. The novel excels when it’s dealing with its world’s lore, making it thematically important, but falters when it comes to building suspense in certain scenes.
After an important Saypuri historian is found dead in the city of Bulikov, Saypur puts a young female ambassador named Shara at the head of the investigation. Shara, however, soon understands that her task will grow beyond her wildest dreams, as she proceeds to uncover uncomfortable secrets about Bulikov’s history and about her own people.
The setting of the novel is its [...]
There is nothing inherently wrong with unlikable narrators: their personality can very well add to the narrative, being tied to its themes and discussions in an engaging way. Liars Called’s despicable narrator, however, only subtracts from the experience: if at first, the protagonist’s bitter and self-centered personality seems to be a perfect fit for an allegorical story about predatory capitalism, his lack of development throughout the book ends up making him a repetitive and tiresome character.
The protagonist is a young man, phallically named Lance Hawthorn Underwood, who one day is invited to go inside a magical bus by three – the book is full of threes – terrifying [...]
Written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale is a book that builds a very creative urban fantasy setting with witty prose, finding in the absurd the ideal medium to explore its nihilistic worldview. Based on a podcast of the same name, Welcome to Night Vale is a funny and surprisingly thoughtful novel.
The setting is the town of Night Vale, a place that looks like the aberrant child of Lovecraft and Kafka, with its own rules of time and space, where monstrous creatures coexist with humans so immersed in their routines that they don’t have the time and energy to care about the fact that nothing around them makes any sense. It’s a city where hooded [...]