Peter Reich

This book really stuck out as original in my mind in the way it fuses together different scenes and characters with a narrative and descriptive flow identical to some of the dreams I've had. This occurs very near the beginning of the book and is a feat never quite repeated in the rest of it. The first third of the book has some very interesting bits in it aside from the previously mentioned. It sort of sucked me into a mystical pseudo-scientific world I used to experience when I was a kid reading those heavily illustrated UFO and Monster-Cryptid books you could get at elementary school book fairs. However, there were places where the text seemed to bog down.
The second third of the book seemed to zoom by and had I the spare time I would have probably read much farther if not finished the book. The last third of the book though was a slower read, at least for me, it also seemed to relate to The Book of the SubGenius in my imagination for some reason or another. The book is split into halves with the first welded together by the framing episode of a motorcycle accident in France and the anesthetic gas that precipitates the dream state where all its ideas swirl together. The second half was very fragmentary and jagged. Whether or not that was the author's intention, I found it abrasive and hard to read as each subsection skipped around. This section of the book also got repetitive with its imagery which seemed intended in order to create some connective tissue but which sort of lost me.
I did like this book if not solely for the dream-like flow at its start but also for its good use of imagery and the science fiction framed but ultimately fantastical element of "cloudbusting". I would recommend this to readers looking for something a little different; an auto-biographical mishmash of dreams and memories with the added elements of weather machines and UFOs.… (mer)