The Library at Mount Char

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The most genuinely original fantasy I’ve ever read. Hawkins plays with really, really big ideas and does it with superb invention, deeply affecting characters, and a smashing climax I did not see coming." - Nancy Kress So, if you like strange characters with a God-complex and you enjoy reading something that is truly nothing like you’ve ever read before, this is probably a good option for you. I very much enjoyed it.

The Library at Mount Char is an odd little fantasy about a tribe of orphaned children being raised in a "library" by Father, an enigmatic cult-like leader (or so it seems at first). Carolyn is my favorite, probably because most of the novel is told through her perspective. It's very interesting that so much is from her POV and yet there is still a lot about her that is a mystery to the reader. In some ways this book is a character study of a very disturbed person, that becomes weirdly relatable by the end of the novel. Steve was also a great character, as someone who is more grounded in normal reality, he provides a "way in" to parts of the story. Erwin is just the best. He provides some needed (dark) comic relief throughout the novel. Any complaints I might have about this book were minor. There are some long talking scenes that repeat information to characters that I, as a reader, already knew. That was fine, it happens to the best of us. The pacing of the last act runs a little long, but again, by that point I didn’t care because the book was just laying down the payoff of the mysteries it promised to solve at the beginning, and I was fine with that. There are horrible things done to people. Horrible things! But it’s not voyeuristic and purposeless. There is a method to the horror and madness, and it’s treated fairly. Possibly due to growing up with Doctor Who, possibly due to just me being a fairly eclectic individual, I’ve never cared too much about genre boundaries. Oh, there are times I might fancy a change of setting, and might swap modern day horror for dystopia, or exchange some traditional space sf for a bit of high fantasy, but that is just another destination for my literary Tardis and sooner or later I know I’ll be setting the randomiser and be off somewhen else. Naturally, this also means that I have a distinct fondness for books which don’t fit easily into one category or another. Read enough fantasy and you start to notice common throughlines and the usual tropes. You start being able to predict where stories or character arcs will go, sometimes from the beginning of the story.This is a tough book to review without getting caught up in explaining myriad insane details. Suffice to say, our story centers on one "librarian" named Carolyn whose specialty is languages. And by languages, we mean ALL the languages. Carolyn started out as a fairly normal childhood, but when she was orphaned she was adopted by a very strange Father. A Father who was incredibly powerful, but not a gentle and caring figure, and only took on a handful of children to learn the various catalogs in the library - catalogs that focused on things like language, war, healing, mathematics, and more tenuous things like the realm of death and futures that never were. Anyone can read from the blurb that these kids were adopted when their parents were killed by some bomb. They were adopted by the FATHER, he is a god, or God or something. He brought the kids to live in the library and they all had sections they were assigned to and they had to learn that all the time. Then FATHER goes missing, or is he missing? I can't even give a review it's so strange to try to do without some major spoilers.

At times reminding me of bits of American Gods and The Magicians, The Library at Mount Char is both interesting and pretty messed up. There are scenes with tons of dogs being brutally murdered and people being burned to death in a grill shaped like a bull. Not to mention that the kids grow up to pretty much be sociopaths, with the rape and murder and such. The only trouble is that in the war to make a new God, she's forgotten to protect the things that make her human. Similarly, several times excessive force is used rather arbitrarily. This is understandable for Father and the Pelapi who obviously work on a slightly different scale, however even normal characters seemed to regard violence or threats as a first resort, something which again made neither Steve nor Erwin, our supposed perspective characters particularly easy to sympathise with.As many other reviewers have said, this book is a lot of weird and strange and horrifying. And also straight up compulsively readable. I don't generally think I like dark books, but sometimes they pull me in really strongly. This book certainly did. Father could do strange things. He could call light from darkness. Sometimes he raised the dead. And when he was disobeyed, the consequences were terrible. In the years since Father took her in, Carolyn hasn't gotten out much. Instead she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient Pelapi customs. They've studied the books in his library and learned some of the secrets behind his equally ancient power. Sometimes they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God. Now Father is missing. And if God truly is dead, the only thing that matters is who will inherit his library - and with it power over all of creation. The Library at Mount Char is the most fun I've had reading a book in a long time. I feel like I used that exact same line in another book review recently, but I lied if that's the case. This book really is the most fun I've had reading a book in a long time. If I use that line again in the near future, please remind me that I'm lying about that book, too. I think I've made my point way too clear at this point. I've gotta stop using the same word multiple times in the same sentence even if the meaning is different. I can honestly say this was one of the most bizarre books I've ever read! I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but this book was so unique and eccentric, it would blow the mind of even the most seasoned readers:

Then I started to really like it when the kids were in Mrs. McGillicutty's house with Steve, it got comical and I started understanding an eenie meenie bit more! :-)Did it hold up to my beefed-up expectations? Did it lose any of the fires of ultimate agony or any of its Asshole Buddhism? Hello, No. :) I still love it. It’s hard to know where to start with this book other than … WOW. What a trip. Imagine if the movie Mother!, Dr. Strange, and an M. C. Escher painting had a baby — you might be close to capturing the essence of this psychotropic tome.

Somehow, this dude sat down and wrote a science fiction novel. The book is great, the way Zelazny and Philip Jose Farmer used to write. Absolutely amazing!!! Many people are familiar with Schrödinger's cat, a thought experiment developed by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in the mid-1930s. Essentially, the idea was this: if you put a cat in a box, to an external observer, the cat is equally likely to be alive or dead at any given moment (or, more accurately, simultaneously alive and dead—e.g., quantum superposition). Smarter people than I (of which there are many) can elucidate how the experiment suggests flaws in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects, but I’m going to apply it to another scenario. A pyrotechnic debut...The most terrifyingly psychopathic depiction of a family of gods and their abusive fathersince Genesis." - Charles Stross The second third had me gushing thinking I had a new book for my top 10 - I couldn't put it down! So much was happening and I couldn't wait to see what would happen next! The dogs! Lions! Hostages! Erwin! All great. Then it all went dark (literally) and I was so excited for what was going to happen next...The old man's eyes went distant for a moment, trying to remember how he knew that name. He thought about it for a while, then gave up. Carolyn might have told him that he could drive by Garrison Oaks four times a day every day for a thousand years and still not remember it, but she didn't. An extravagant, beautifully imagined fantasy about a universe that is both familiar and unfamiliar. . . . Hawkins makes nary a misstep in this award-worthy effort of imagination.You won’t be able to put it down.” — Booklist(starred review) I'm good. Still clearing my head. Thanks, though." She stretched her face into something like a smile.