Dan Wells wrote a piece about this for the "Big Ideas" series on Whatever, and the concept intrigued me. John Cleaver is a sociopath, but Wells manages to make you empathize with him. His level of self-awareness makes him really interesting, he knows that if he just goes along with his impulses that he could really easily become a serial killer, and yet he has decided that it would be a bad thing to do, and so he has come up with all these rules to follow in order to avoid it. It is a far more mature approach to the world than most people ever manage, and yet he still comes across as a very believable (if weird) teenage kid.John Cleaver on his own would be fascinating, but the story itself is also great. Wells manages to set up a situation where John is the only person who can actually cope with the problem at hand (or at least, he thinks he is, and I didn't disagree with him) and while the supernatural aspects of the story might not appeal to everyone, I quite enjoyed them. Apparently this is the first in a series, and I'm definitely looking forward to more!
No comments:
Post a Comment