All Souls Lost
by Dan Moren
Monday, January 15, 2024
I pulled up the sample of this book on my iPad just on the basis that I’ve heard the author on various podcasts and was interested to see what he wrote, I wasn’t expecting to get sucked in enough to actually read it, I guess I was just being polite! But it worked out ok…
For a long time I’ve not really been a fan of ghost stories, but I’m realising it’s not the ghosts themselves that are the problem, it’s the way they are often used where the boundaries of the fiction aren’t clear to the reader and they just feel like a cheating device. That didn’t feel like the case here, the supernatural and its limitations were pretty clear from the beginning. And the ghost tricks here tend to fail spectacularly creating mad problems rather than being the kind of deus ex machina devices that annoy me. It’s fun.
The book is pretty much a tech thriller but set in a universe quite like ours where there just happen to be some other things going on beneath the surface. And some parts of the ‘universe quite like ours’ was a very thin name-changing veneer on the world we live in, but I’m fine with that.
A fun read, and I’m glad I picked it up and ran with it.