Customer Reviews

Hope (Gollancz Sf S.)

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

 

 

this is an enjoyable little book. loosely connected sketches that intertwine in delightful ways, it is a light and breezy read. which is part of its charm and also its problem. nothing wrong with the work, no, but with the way it's been marketed. white wolf publishing's habit is to take decent material and slap the 'cutting edge horror' subgenre label onto it with nary a thought to its actual contents. this is fantasy. sometimes dark. more often than not ... not. but enough of white wolf's typically pretentious fumbles. this one is worth the effort to find it.

while the sense of scale is never really an issue to the stories at large (a five by two by one mile seafaring vessel? even using only 3000 vertical feet, with levels each a generous 10 feet high, you're looking at 300 decks each about 10 miles square--that's some 3000 square miles of habitable surface area, folks; this horrifically huge living area just never comes across and the story comes off instead as taking place on nothing larger than your average liner, not an oceangoing world of steel) , the writing is sharp and the dialogue is natural and the characters are well-observed.

this is a true gothic. decadence and decay reflected in the decline of the ship and of the society she contains, this is one dark and stormy night journey you'll likely remember if for no other reason than that the premise itself is just plain strange and not just a little original.

definetly worth the price of admission.

The idea of The Hope - an eerie, seemingly abandoned cruise ship with all those on board left to fend for themselves - is an excellent idea. The way the story has been told (through a series of what could easily be short stories which stand up well on their own) has also been written a lot better than similar attempts at this style of writing.

It certainly is a very gothic tale, although I'm not sure I could call it horror. Regrettably, the author seems to get a little confused as to the message he's conveying - is it a fable about society's class structure? Every time I thought I understood where he was going, he twisted it around or it became a little nonsensical. Given the story's ending, I'm not sure that was his intention.

Parts of this novel quite annoyed me - I'm no prude, but there were some totally arbitrary points in this book which were included simply to shock or disgust, without adding anything to the story whatsoever. Almost felt like the author was pressured to add them in at the insistence of his editor to turn it into "horror" ;-)

All in all - great if you're into gothic, eerie, dark atmospheric stories. Lovegrove has written a much better novel which you'll like if you're into the concept of the Hope - check his book called "Days".

The Hope is a massive ocean liner the size of a small city, that was funded by an eccentric philanthropist who killed himself shortly after its completion. It launched in spite of this bad omen, and now thirty-some years later has become a degenerate microcosm of society, with still no destination in sight. The story is composed of a series of vignettes, not necessarily complete in their own right, but which interweave and combine to form a greater scene. The ship's chief engineer tells a far-fetched story of deadly, unnatural vermin that infest the ship's inner workings. A teenaged drug addict finds her salvation through a kindly old woman with a special smile. A man is convinced that the ship is trying to kill his wife. A jaded misanthrope tends a haunted library. Turf wars erupt, passengers declare war on their neighbors, and the poor struggle to feed their children. Grim on the face of it but filled with black humor, it's nearly as funny as it is bleak. But when the deceptively simple yet chilling secret of the Hope is finally revealed, the irony in the name of the ship will become clear, and the despair you'll feel for the crew and passengers trapped on its endless voyage will be very, very real. A modern gothic classic worth seeking out.

The Hope is a ship that just keeps sailing onward even though it was supposed to be going somewhere. The narration says that it's sailing on an endless ocean, which kind of creates problems since who would create a ship to sail on an ocean that doesn't end? Anyhow the book is a series of short stories concerning these people who have been on the voyage so long that most of the original passengers are dead and the ship is being run by the children who have grown up in the perpetual ship. There are some grand scenes of desperation as the stories go from the upper decks to the lower decks to the crew in the engine room.

The concept is intriguing but the execution feels forced. The stories do comment on each other and you see characters come back from one story to the next. Like there's a chef who tells a story of how he poisoned 23 people and the story is referenced later as one of the characters in a later story turns out to be the audience. There are some great disturbing images throughout; however, I found the author trying to hard to shock with almost every story. The quiet moments are overtaken by this "everybody is doomed" dynamic going throughout the piece. In the end, it becomes a series of disturbing images without much else to take away from it.

However, the images are entertainly disturbing enough to give it four stars. If you find a copy, definitely buy it and read it. But don't expect to remember it too much.

THIS is a MARVELOUS Horror story, that takes place on a cruise ship one mile high and file miles long sometime in the future. The ship is haunted and so will the reader become. The story is presented in a series of short stories, which make it a fascinating read, as the characters slowly intertwine. I highly recommend to fans of Poe, Barker, and King.