The Cluttered and the Dead

Target: David Edison’s The Waking Engine

Profile: Weird Fantasy

There is point during the creative process when too many ideas can be as bad as too few.  I’m personally a very poor judge of where that limit is, but The Waking Engine is firmly on the wrong side of it.  Some of the book’s core concepts are interesting and fresh, but they are buried under layers of borrowed imagery, and symbolism stolen from across the width and breadth of fantasy and science fiction.  The only thing I took away was a deeper appreciation for the authors who make genre mashups look easy.

The Waking Engine is the story of Cooper, a young man who is flung across a multiverse and wakes up in home of true death, the City Unspoken.  Like a twisted version of Hindu reincarnation, people who die in this setting wake up moments later as themselves on a different world.  Eventually, this process leads everyone to the City, where their weary souls might finally find eternal rest.  Only, no one’s dying.  The City Unspoken is failing and Cooper may have to be the one to put everything right again.

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