Monday 21 July 2014

URBAN FANTASY REVIEW: Apocalypse Now Now - Charlie Human

Release Date: 03/04/14
Publisher:  Arrow Books

SYNOPSIS:

Neil Gaiman meets Tarantino in this madcap, wildly entertaining journey into Cape Town's supernatural underworld. I love the smell of parallel dimensions in the morning. Baxter Zevcenko's life is pretty sweet. As the 16-year-old kingpin of the Spider, his smut-peddling schoolyard syndicate, he's making a name for himself as an up-and-coming entrepreneur. Profits are on the rise, the other gangs are staying out of his business, and he's going out with Esme, the girl of his dreams. But when Esme gets kidnapped, and all the clues point towards strange forces at work, things start to get seriously weird. The only man drunk enough to help is a bearded, booze-soaked, supernatural bounty hunter that goes by the name of Jackson 'Jackie' Ronin. Plunged into the increasingly bizarre landscape of Cape Town's supernatural underworld, Baxter and Ronin team up to save Esme. On a journey that takes them through the realms of impossibility, they must face every conceivable nightmare to get her back, including the odd brush with the Apocalypse.


REVIEW:

A South African novel that brings a lot of the modern classic influences into it. Whilst I wasn’t enamoured of the book, I did like the concept, I liked the idea’s explored within and could see the work that had gone into it.

Personally I found the principle character hard to get on with, I felt that it took a while to get anywhere and for me, it’s a series that I won’t be returning to as it’s not struck me as a must read. Whilst there will be quite a few readers out there that will love the book, for me it didn’t hit the right spot, leaving this more as a marmite type of title.

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