Dimmer Light

Tonight I finished reading the book Dying of the Light, by George R.R. Martin. I discovered his Song of Ice and Fire books a few years ago, thanks to a friend of mine, and immediately loved them. And it seems most fans of his work found him there as well -- his previous books from decades ago are only now coming back into print.

I've read two of those earlier books now, Dying of the Light and Fevre Dream. The former is a science fiction novel. The latter is gothic horror. So both quite far removed from the fantasy series that made him famous.

And yet those two earlier books are quite close to each other. Both are told from the perspective of a single character who gets caught up in a clash where one figure of some socio-political stature is trying to bring about change within his culture. The particulars are quite different, but that raw set-up is the same. And perhaps for this reason, I was not quite so enthusiastic about Dying of the Light.

Fevre Dream is a great book, an unqualified A. It saw in it everything that I hear fans of Anne Rice and Stephen King claim to find from those writers (stuff that I've never really found myself in sampling them). It was tense throughout, at times frightening, at times horrific, and thoroughly engaging.

Treading in a similar area, Dying of the Light seemed to be an inferior work to me. It's worth the read. And it's certainly less close to Fevre Dream than other writers' books tend to be to one another. (Much as I enjoy Chuck Palahniuk, for example, his books are rather cookie cutter. And Dan Brown wrote essentially the same book three times before his fourth iteration -- The Da Vinci Code -- secured him naked treasure baths for life.) Maybe I've come to expect too much from Martin. But for whatever reason, I can only rate Dying of the Light a B.

However, it's a brisk, short book. So any who have been given pause by the epic, 1000-page nature of the Ice and Fire books might want to sample Dying of the Light to see if Martin's writing entrances them as it has me.