A review by wordboydave
Resume with Monsters by William Browning Spencer

3.0

I love Charles Stross's humorous spy-meets-Cthulhu-meets-bureaucracy novels, and this is like that, only with no espionage and a lot less focus. It's brilliantly written, with a good line on every page and not a single bad sentence I could find. But it does take a while to find its footing, and on my White Wolf Press Edition (486 huge-type pages), it didn't really kick into high gear until 200 pages in. But I can't dismiss it outright, because there's frankly nothing else like it (except Charles Stross and maybe Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas. If this is the kind of work being done in Austin, Texas, I'd love to see more. But this feels like a very personal obsessive novel, one where you have to sort of convert to the author's point of view, rather than a novel designed to be consistently riveting. In summary: smart, funny, and I love the concept, but the execution was a little too navel-gazing and scattered to get my highest marks.