4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Killed a great idea., December 19, 2007
Williams really should have just made this a seperate series, if he wrote it at all. To put "books of the Cataclysm" on the cover almost seems like false advertising.
The first book would get five stars, this sequel has almost nothing in common. What started out as truly inspired, Lovecraftian, surreal "end of the world" story, with realities colliding, mirror twins, monsters in the dark, all cities merging, all of humanity being devoured, etc has now become one of "stone mages", "mani'kins" and "sky-lords" and more stereotypical themes that could be found in any generic fantasy novel. If I wanted to read about those things, I could taken my pick of any other fantasy series, but I don't and I was tricked into reading about them anyway because I liked the first book and I thought this series was going to completely different.
Now its thousands of years into the future, and all characters from the first one are dead, and the one surviving one changed beyond recognition. No, scratch that. The entire series is changed beyond recognition. Yod is only mentioned once, which is an insult considering how big a role he played in the first book.
The first book had mind-blowing imagery of our world turned upside down and had awesome potential. This second book should have focused more on that, but no, instead we have an overlong book with cliched situations, juvenile dialogue, new indistinguishable, unlikeable characters who bicker with one another and whose largest concerns are dealing with the local bureaucrats over a "blood tax" and getting attacked by golems. Bring back the eery, chilling composite city and the twins fleeing in a world gone mad, overshadowed by the Cthulhu-like Yod.
I want Kafkaesque and Lovecraftian, not a mediocre Final Fantasy world.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome, September 23, 2006
The Blood Debt is awesome! Williams' books just keep getting better. Although this could be read easily as a stand alone, do yourself a favour and go and read The Crooked Letter and then read this! Then just try and stop yourself reading the third book! Fantastic characterisation and pageturning prose set in a mystical and unpredictable world. Five stars!!!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Australian SF Reader, July 31, 2007
Having read The Crooked Letter a while ago, somewhat of a surprise to find this jumping into a story with older verions of the characters from The Books of the Change. A pleasant surprise nonetheless. As the characters have aged this series is again more adult in tone and content, not deliberately designed to be young reader friendly like The
Stone Mage and the Sea, et. al.
It is still very good, and revolves around Skender's lost mother, and Sal's father, creating a homunculus, that it turns out, unsurprisingly, is carrying the minds of both Seth and Hadrian from the first book.
The setting is a desert city called Laure, where people used
charmed hang-gliders to retrieve articles from the divide for sale, and there are Change practitioners who use blood as a source. No need to blood bank ads, here!
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