Customer Reviews

Frenzetta

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Not for the faint of heart and weak of stomach, this is one of the best novels I had the pleasure to read this year. It's a book both wonderful and disturbing in its portrayal of sensuous exoticism and mind-numbing brutality, with Calder's baroque prose rarely, if ever, missing a beat.

I picked this up after reading Calder's Dead Things trillogy which I enjoyed a great deal for its fetishistic, perverse, and increasingly disjointed world. Frenzetta does create an interesting world which could provide an interesting story but it seems that Calder has lost his pace.

One of the major drives in Dead Things was the fetishistic intensity which he sucessfully integrated into the plot. The same intensity is present in this book but the world he created disallows the same integration in to the story. As a result, it comes off as obscessive rather than interesting.

I was even more dissapointed by The Twist so while this wasn't as good as I expected, it was still readable. If you're a Calder fan, its worth a read... as long as you find it used.

Otherwise Calder needs to give up on the deadly dolly thing until he can make it work again.

Overall definitely worth reading. I thought there was a little "thesaurus action" here, i.e. using larger words for the impact of the size rather than the story. The concepts of species diversity are fresh and interesting, although as a science guy I would've like some more exploration into that process and how it happened.

I was so anxious to receive this book and read it, just my cup of tea! A reanimated corpse in love with a rat-queen who can't get enough bedtime favors, who leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Wow.

Now the reality check. What sounds like a spectacular idea and a great story is utterly ruined by a first person POV that is so randomly and haphazardly told that it is not only hard to follow but unfathomably boring. There seems to be not a fragment of straightforwardness in Calder's prose, though he also misses out on the poetry of surrealism.

Only 190 pages, it still took me a couple of weeks to labor through Frenzetta, and for all that I was still left un-rewarded with any type of conclusion satisfactory enough to warrant the time I spend tediously wading through paragraphs of random images to find one small sentence that moved the fragmented storyline further towards its finish.

This is not lyricism; it's more like listening to someone with schizophrenia or dementia describe a dream to you, that someone else had. Whew. Save your money and pick up Edward Lee if you want gross, or China Mieville if you want lyricism.