Bathing the Lion

Bearing in mind that Jonathan Carroll is in my top 3- 4 writers ( alongside John Crowley,James Tiptree Jr and John Irving), I would normally expect any book of his to be way up there in quality but sadly Bathing the Lion is one of the few duds I've read by him. I think it was too short in some ways and fell back too much on introducing one upon another concepts as being very important and telling us they are important rather than showing us organically why they are and, at the end you ended up with a sense that if Jonathan had been able to somehow to demonstrate how the Mechanics worked in the early parts of the book then it would have worked out a whole lot better. More pages would have allowed that to take place.

I also have to admit that there was something about Vanessa in particular that really got me almost angry- I didn't like her as a character and couldn't see why Dean loved her so much, and what on Earth Kasper would ever have seen in her as a sometimes lover.

In the end, in the last few pages, where Kasper explains what has happened to Crebold, you end up with what amounts to a great big reset so everything that happened in the book had reverted back to our normal world in a manner that is just a step up from I awoke and found it had all been a dream.

Its got 3 stars from me because of the quality of some of the imagery and text itself rather than the storyline but truthfully I hope that his next novel( which i believe is out in Poland in the near future is much better than Bathing the Lion was. Sorry, Jonathan but I still rate you as one of the best writers out there despite this.