The Reality Dysfunction

Started this because a coworker described it as “space opera that turns into a horror novel around the four hundred page mark” and I couldn’t say no to that pitch. He undersold it, honestly. The first third took a long time just to establish all the characters and explore the various settings, so many that I kept a running list on my phone to remember who belonged to which faction, and I don’t usually need to do that.

Once the actual reality dysfunction kicks in, the dead becoming able to possess the living by causing extreme pain and not wanting to go back, the book earns the horror comparison completely. Hamilton is genuinely good at foreshadowing, color me impressed, things that felt ancillary in the first chapter turned out to be insanely important later, small early details and throwaway lines that had been quietly loaded the whole time. That kind of long-game plotting is rare enough that I want to give it real credit even though getting there took some patience.

The scale is the whole appeal and also the biggest ask. It’ll take a long time even for fast readers to chew through, but is it worth it, yes. My interest waned a few times in that first third, dense enough that I’d catch myself skimming forward instead of stopping, before the momentum caught for good. Once it caught, I stopped minding the density. The universe-building that felt like padding early on paid off as the different threads started colliding.

My problem here can be summed up in two words, flat characters. Hamilton does not bother giving most of his people more than a name and a cursory backstory, and a few genuinely interesting ones do not make up for it. That is my main knock, for a book asking this much time from me I wanted to feel more for the cast than I did.

Four stars, and I’ve already started book two, which either says something about how good this was or how sunk my cost already is. Probably both.