I was a big fan of Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson’s Shadows of the Short Days, which made my Top 11 Books list last year. The sequel has been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to get to it for a minute, and I just finished it tonight, and …

… well, I’m kinda torn. Shadows got tons of comparisons to China Miéville, and Storm has been as well, but this one isn’t Miéville so much as it is pure Lovecraft. Like, it’s a book-length Icelandic reimagining of Mountains of Madness; there are byakhee and Elder Things and what amounts to a Deep Ones cult and a talking brain in a jar and unnamable colors and fungi from Yuggoth. It’s so overt that I don’t understand how anyone managed to miss it.

That’s not a complaint, mind you, as I remain an unabashed fan of Lovecraft’s mythos despite the fact that the man himself was the worst kind of trash. And this is absolutely good nu-Lovecraft, which is something I’d like to see more of. But there’s no escaping the fact that one of my favorite things about the first book was its breathtaking uniqueness compared to everything else on my shelves, and this book is a lot of things, but “breathtakingly unique” isn’t one of them.

It also ends strangely, with the climax a good hundred pages before the end of the book and then a leap forward by a decade or so, and while it very well could be my fault for trying to read after getting home from work on a Friday I felt like the last part of the book was somewhat incoherent and unnecessary. I’ve only said this once before, but when you hit that time jump, if you’re not a hundred percent invested, you can probably get away with putting the book down at that point. It’s not quite as severe as the quality drop in Seveneves— I’ve never seen anything else that has been– but it’s jarring and more than a little under explained.

(There’s another connection with Seveneves, actually; take a close look at the cover.)

And it’s at this point where I realize that I’m in paragraph five and I haven’t mentioned the plot yet, but really, you already know. If you liked the first book and you like Miéville and Lovecraft and don’t mind a lot of Icelandic vocabulary you ought to pick this up. Hell, if you haven’t read the first book you can probably get away with reading this one anyway, as the connections to the first book aren’t as strong as you might generally expect. It’s a loose sequel, and saying more would constitute spoilers, but I think it works as a standalone.

On to the next three Red Rising books.