Escape from Death

It can be really difficult for an author to strike a balance between over-exposition and leaving the reader confused. This is particularly difficult when the setting is intended to be surreal, bizarre, alien, or similar. I think some titles from CoG that manage to pull this off include Choice of the Deathless, Changeling Charade, Tower Behind the Moon, and Faerie's Bargain. All of these titles are able to throw allusions and the unknown at you in a way that you are still able to make sense of it. They have crafted the Potemkin illusion that every little random thing is imbued with depth and meaning, that the fictional world is infinitely complex and yet comprehensible. Escape from Death aims to insert you into a surrealistic - and awful - afterlife as a fish out of water. Some amount of confusion comes with the territory. Unfortunately, I was just baffled throughout most of it and not in a good way. More along the lines of "Ok we escaped from that person" only for two scenes later we are going back to that place and one of the options is to go meet up with them. Like, did I miss something important? Aren't we on the run? There's also a politicking mechanic that is really odd, and…

Good

I like spiders, is that wrong? If someone took a handful of spiders and put them in my mouth, and I would have to eat them. Maybe I could do it. But I know I would feel guilty about it.

This is a really tricky recommendation to make, as Escape From Death is such a weird book. Well, deep down its actually a pretty normal fantasy book, but the execution has some quirks that makes it both really interesting but also kinda abrasive to read. Do make sure to check out the demo if it sounds interesting; I've rather enjoyed my time with it, but maybe not all parts of the book. Escape From Death is a very fragmented book. Scenes, environments, world building, characters; they are all more or less disjointed and feel like they are formed from irreconcilable fragments. Some scenes feel like vignettes more than a connected story, where shorter moments in sparsely described environments sort of appear without much connective tissue. And this is not a pacing issue, scenes are given the room they need to feel properly weighty and slower paced when needed (apart from maybe the final chapter). Still this disjointedness makes for a reading that's not very engaging in itself -- it's easy to forget yourself and get distracted or simply not attach emotionally to the story when it doesn't feel like it's giving you a single idea or object to desire / want to know more about. But it a…