needs more demons?

The Raw Shark Texts is an out-of-the-park homerun of a book for me, soaring over the Monster, bound for who knows where. My friend Marty convinced me to read it with enigmatic remarks about how he didn’t want to tell me anything about it, but thought I’d like it. That seems like a wise strategy. I will mention only three things:

• Hall’s prose and dialogue are uncommonly vivid and lively. Even if I didn’t love what this book is about (and I do), I would admire the craft with which it’s written.
• Although it starts in distinctly Memento-ish territory, it doesn’t stay there very long
• The Raw Shark Texts is one of the most strikingly original things I’ve read in ages, but it did still remind me in fits and starts of Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Carroll, William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers, Charlie Kaufman, Neal Stephenson, and George Saunders — or, in other words, a whole passel of my favorite writers. And I’d recommended it unhesitatingly to anyone iwith a fondness for any of the above.

needs more demons? Absolutely not.