Review: Advent 9

Advent 9 by T. Alan Horne
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Despite the claims of its late editor Dave Farland, this book doesn't invent a new genre of "Superpunk". Supers novels have been a low-profile but prolific subgenre of SFF for years; this is only one of 52 books on my Goodreads "supers" shelf (at time of review), and certainly as far as I read - admittedly not quite halfway - it was similar enough to the others that it clearly belonged there. (And there are several large series that, for one reason or another, I haven't read.)

It's better written and better edited than most, though by itself that's faint praise; supers novels, like steampunk, seem to attract incompetent writers for some reason. Let me be clearer: It's well written, and apart from a couple of dangling modifiers, some mispunctuated dialog and a few other minor glitches, even the pre-publication version I got for review from Netgalley is clean from a copy editing perspective.

So why did I stop reading it? Simply because the blurb (at the time I picked it up) did not alert me to a key fact: as well as a supers story, this is also a horror story, featuring several psychotic mass murderers or serial killers and also battling terrifying monsters in a slimy subterranean labyrinth, and that is not something I personally enjoy reading.

View all my reviews