Sensation, by Nick Mamatas

[essentialsaltes]

I guess others had sorta warned me that Sensation might be a little out there. Fortunately, I have no problem with 'out there'. Unfortunately, Sensation just doesn't speak to me. It's written with verve, but doesn't seem to have much to say. I enjoyed the first half, which uses a lot of different text styles (emails, blogposts, forms, epistles, etc.) to experiment with telling a distributed story, with some mysterious hints of something larger. But when the greater mystery is more fully revealed, it doesn't really transform what's gone before, the text becomes more vanilla, and the plot itself doesn't seem to know what to do. And then it ends.

It may also suffer in comparison with the House of Rumours, which I am coincidentally reading at the same time, and which shares a few vague similarities to Sensation (above and beyond the fact that jason_brez lent me both). And I am really digging it.