One Rainy Day in May: The Familiar, Volume 1
My first response on hearing that Mark Danielewski's new book was the start of a 27 volume series was "Good luck with that". I liked 'House of Leaves' though, so why not?
'One Rainy Day in May' mostly involves Xanther, a young girl in LA who, on the way to getting a much-needed service dog, finds a kitten. Other perspective characters are her parents: her mother, Astair, awaiting a verdict on her dissertation and her adoptive father, Anwar, whose video game company is troubled. Related, but not connected yet other than being in LA and knowledge of a series of murders are gang member, Luther Perez, a detective looking into gang crimes Oz Talat, an Armenian taxi driver named Shnorkh. Farther and father there are Cas and Apollo, computer scientists in TX on the run from somebody or something, a mystic of a kind in Mexico named Isandorno, and, finally, the almost incomprehensible JingJing in Singapore who is an assistant to a healing woman. They get introduced, but only a few of them...accomplish?...anything yet.
This is an 800+ page introduction to what will become 'The Familiar'. There is a lot of noodling about with fonts and page formatting, the main characters are color and font coded, but there are only one or two times that those tricks pay off. The fonts and colors are not intuitive and, perhaps its just me, but at a glance the fonts don't appear different enough to visually separate a character from the previous. Effectively it's pretentious, but not unentertaining. I'll keep going. Its going to be a race between my interest and the publisher's.
The Familiar
'The Familiar, Volume Two: Into the Forest'
