My feelings on this book are hard to pinpoint. It was an incredibly slow start to the book. Many times I felt like I was simply reading a physics textbook and felt like it was a little over my head every now and again. By the time I read half of the book, I was asking myself "Where are the demons I was promised?". There was a lot of character development, for every single character, for the entire first half of the book. I appreciate character development, but there were a lot of characters that he etched out in a lot of detail. I can't say that I don't like this - there are too few books that have any character development at all, so I feel it's not fair to then complain about a book that actually has this feature. The character development was good, but it was hard to wade through. It hasn't taken me a full month to read a book in a very, very long time. It was a bit of a reading curve to get used to the characters talking in the Scottish accent, but I settled into that fairly quickly.Then we get 200+ pages in, more than half the book, and shit hits the fan. There is no other way to describe this part of the plot. Here are the demons that I was promised, and it was awesome. It finally became a page turner that I didn't want to put down. It was gory. It was interesting. Things were finally happening. It almost made me forget about the first portion of the book.And then the book ended.And then that look dawned on my face. The look so many readers get once they finish a book and they have to ask themselves, "What the hell just happened?" Well - I get the deeper meaning behind the ending, and why it should be such a powerful way to end the book, but it's not. It left me feeling a little cheated and a little bit like that ending could have been fleshed out a little bit more, considering how fleshed out the beginning was. I understand why it ended the way it did, but it doesn't make me like it that much more.All in all, I have to say that the book was alright. Not good enough that I'm going to recommend it to everyone that I talk to, but good enough that I will recommend it to a slight few that I think may appreciate the small things this book does. It was good enough that I would be willing to give another book by Christopher Brookmyre a shot and see if I can't delve a little more into his world.Three Stars - It was good. I wouldn't read it again, but I would give it to a few select others and say "Give it a chance." Probably the book of his that I've enjoyed the least, and I've read 6 or 7 of them now. I still liked the black humour and the way he develops his characters and creates the most unlikely heroes, but I found it harder to get into, particularly all the scenes at the military base. A bus load of 17 year olds from Glasgow are travelling to an isolated Outward Bound type retreat to help them come to terms with the brutal murder of one of their peers at their Catholic school. There are all the usual cliques, mostly shown from the perspective of Adnan, a science geek gamer, but you got to see various of the others' point of view as they struggle with he usual teen issues around sex, popularity and what the rest all think of you. Meanwhile, in an underground secret base nearby, demons that have been captured are tortured by special envoys from the Vatican alongside the US military to try and determine how they can be kept from taking over the earth. When the decision is made to shut the project down, an act of sabotage allows them to escape and attack the pupils at the centre.It's gory rather than scary and the body count is pretty high, although you can mostly predict who will survive, but not who will turn into heroes. I was disappointed by the ending, although in some ways it made it more interesting, and there could possibly be a sequel as I'd be very interested in what happened to some of the characters.I still plan to read all the rest of his books as they are unusual stories and I love his vicious humour and satire, but if you are new to this author I wouldn't start with this one.
What do You think about Pandaemonium (2009)?
Bit if a departure from the Brookmyre norm but a rollercoaster ride to hell that had me hooked!
—swill64
I am very impressed with this author. Can't believe I never came across him before
—Goatchan
