needs more demons?

I loved Stewart’s Perfect Circle so much that I bought several more of his novels, and then didn’t read any of them for a while for fear they wouldn’t live up to the expectations Perfect Circle had set.

I’m glad I waited to read Resurrection Man, partly because it isn’t quite as good (it’s one of Stewart’s earliest novels) but also because both are fundamentally guy-forced-to-grow-up-and-confront-stuff novels where the force originates at least partly from the guy’s supernatural abilities. In Resurrection Man a good chunk of what Dante has to confront is mortality, quite literally represented in the opening chapters in which he dissects what appears to be his own corpse.

It’s very rare that I think a novel has too little exposition, but Resurrection Man is perhaps an example, mostly because Stewart’s characters use fairly common words (angel, minotaur) with quite different meanings. It’s quickly apparent that Resurrection Man is set in a world significantly different from ours, but even the alert reader may not figure out the differences in the first several chapters. In some ways this is a good thing, as it places the focus on the characters and their interactions, but Stewart is also parsimonious in dealing out Dante’s family’s backstory. Several characters know important things that they allude to vaguely but don’t spell out for a while (or ever), and the result was initially a bit confusing.

I thought Stewart leaned a little heavily on arthropod imagery for shock value. It works — bugs! ew, gross! — but it’s a bit of a blunt instrument.

These defects are balanced by some vivid writing, sharp dialogue, and well-drawn characters. And as magic-returns-to-the-modern-world stories go, this one is remarkably original in significant respects. If I didn’t find it completely satisfying, I still found it well worth reading.

needs more demons? nah.