There are numerous books that take a character from every day life and throw them into some type of adventure, but Richerd Kadrey takes a different approach and as the story goes along the adventure seems to wrap back on itself.. meaning it was always there if you could only see it. He build's on lots of old stories, beliefs, myths, etc and gives new twists on how to see them. It seems many arthurs have been doing this lately including Philip Pullman's trilogy (The Golden Compass is part of this). It was nice to see Richerd pulled off something quite different.

My main gripe was all the little jokes... It made it feel like a sit-com sometimes. Trying to joke about everything or throwing in vulgarity all the time to be funny or shocking. I just found that stuff distracting from the story. Some would have been fine.. I get the nervousness and other traits that tie some of it to the characters... but it just got annoying. This was frustrating enough for me to lose 1 star otherwise I'd give it 5 stars.

I would have liked to learn more about some of the characters. A few seemed to be very interesting and were killed off earlier than I would have liked... but I guess that is the way it goes when you are compressing a story like this into one book.

Recommended read for anyone into Fantasy (not too-much sci-fi but will fit for some people).
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