 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we are talking about Recursion by Blake Crouch, and I do not have a physical copy on me. I do apologize. This was a request through NetGalley. They sent me an ebook copy for review. I don't usually do ebook copies, but there are so many good books coming out this year that I don't have any contacts for for the publisher. I used to with Crown, but then they closed down blogging for books, and this is where we are. You'll see I have Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, and I have Snowbound over here also. These are both hard covers. Dark Matter was his last relief. Recursion is his newest release, unless I screwed something up with the uploading of this. Recursion is out today, and you can snag it with the link down there in the doobly-doo. Once again, this is not a sponsored review, but I did get the copy of the book for free, for review that has no bearing on my review whatsoever. I've been a long time fan of Blake Crouch, and so there's any bias. It's because I really, really like the dudes writing. Recursion is about two people. One of them is a cop. One of them is a scientist, I guess you'd call her, and they are trying, well, she is trying to find the cure for false memory syndrome, which is a disease or phenomenon that's making people remember things that never actually happened, and the other guy is a cop. So the coolest part about this book for me is it is a fictionalized explanation for the Mandela effect. In case you don't know what that is, you can Google it, you can pause the video and go Google it, or the TLDR, the simplest way I can. The reason why it's called the Mandela effect is because there's a whole load of people who believe that Nelson Mandela died in prison back in the 80s or 90s, something like that, but he didn't die until like a couple years ago. So all these people thought he was dead. They were sure that he was dead, and it's not just one or two people, it's loads of people who believe this. It is hot out here, I apologize. But what Blake Crouch does in this book is he tries to form an explanation for this phenomenon, and it is such a wild, crazy, amazing ride. I normally don't go in for science fiction, but Blake Crouch writes the kind of science fiction I like. Like Pines, his wayward Pines series, Dark Matter was an exceptional book. I gave both of those both Pines and Dark Matter five stars. He used to write thrillers, and he was even buddies with J.A. Conrath, who was another thriller horror writer. Actually, I think it was Jack Kilborn, is J.A. Conrath's name for his horror line. But they wrote horror and thrillers together sometimes, not all the time. But I've been a fan of Crouch's ever since back then, with his Andrew Z. Something Smith. I can't remember the name of the character, but he did one at Desert Places, Lock Doors, and I think there's a third one. All the same character. I loved, Luther Kite was the villain's name, I believe. Luther Kite is an amazing villain. One of those villains that has stayed with me all these years later. It's been almost 10 years, man. But Blake Crouch is one of those authors. If you like Chuck Wendig, Blake Crouch and Chuck Wendig kind of write about the same way. They use more fragments, sentences than they do full sentences. It's a very punchy, almost noirish type of writing, and it can be really, really fun to read. There's much, there's less of that in this one. This one is more, it's not really literary, but there's more meat to the actual proceedings. The actual prose, and it's gonna sound funny, he uses more words than I have known Crouch to use to tell a story like this. I don't know if that's because he's maturing as a writer. I don't know because his publisher was like, hey dude, throw some more words out there so we can give people more content for their book. I don't know. I did notice that he wasn't, it wasn't that he was wordier. It was that there was more of a literary prose to it than a stripped down basic, well, it's not basic. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't as punchy. It was still great and very quick read, but it wasn't as punchy as they even Dark Matter was. Another thing I really, really liked about this book and it is a testament to, it feels like he took more time with it. He may not have, but it feels like he took more time with it because we got to know the characters better in this one than we normally do. Usually in his old stuff, and I keep looking at these books, I have not yet read Snowbound, but I keep looking at these books back here because he's done good characters before, but these characters felt oddly deeper than his usual characters. There is a sense of maturity to this work that I haven't gotten before from Crouch and it's not like, you know, a lack of like dirty jokes or brutality or anything like that. It is really hot out here guys. Sorry. It's not anything like that. What it is, is there's a, there's a slowing down of the process with him in this book and in fact it's probably going to chase a lot of people away because it takes a really long time for this book to get going. He's building up these two characters, building, building, building, building, building and then it takes, I would say, almost into like the, maybe 60% into the book. Does everything start going crazy? But there is a scene in here that is all the better for the character development and the time that Crouch takes with the characters. There's a scene in here and I don't want to give anything away man. It's such an amazing scene. I don't even want to like give you the, an overview or be vague about it, but there's a certain scene in here where everything pretty much comes to a head. Ooh, I'm burning up. It, everything comes to a head and I was on the edge of my seat more so than any of his other works. I knew that I had it in me that, you know, the characters were going to be all right, but I was terrified for them and it's one of the more brutal things that, unless you go back and look at his indie stuff like Serial and whatnot that he did with Conrath, it's probably the most brutal thing I've ever read from him. Just the idea of what he put the characters through in that moment was disturbing and that might also be my own personal bias as far as how terrifying I suspect that scenario would be. And I think I, I guess I'll put a spoiler section at the end of this because I really, really want to talk about it. So if you guys, anybody who's watched it or if you don't mind spoilers, check out the after the outro after I say my goodbye. There'll be spoilers there at the tag end, but there was quite a bit of character development in this one that I absolutely loved. It's stuff that you don't normally see from him. With Dark Matter, Dark Matter is really speedy. It, it opens up, it gets going and it never stops. Same with Desert Places and Lock Doors and Pine, the Pines Trilogy, Wayward Pines Trilogy. Like I said, I don't know about Abaddon Abandon. I can't remember what that one's called. I apologize, or Snowbound. I haven't read those. His short fiction is really good also. But with Recursion, like I said, there, there's more attention paid to the characters and I appreciated that. I have seen people that are DNF-ing it that are, you know, do not finish, did not finish. I see people doing that around the 30% mark. I can understand why, but this is one of those times where, you know, I would say hold on, hang out, you know, for a while longer before you give up on it because it doesn't really, I don't, I don't think, for myself, it didn't really get going until about the 60% mark and then it never led up. There's a lot of really cool science in here mixed in with the fiction, and that's what I like about, like, Crouch. He takes things like with Dark Matter, he takes Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Theory, I don't know exactly what it's called, but Schrodinger's Cat is, you know, the way I think of it. He takes that and he expands on it, and this one he takes the Mandela Effect and he expands on it with a super original concept, I think. I think it was a super original concept, and he, he didn't really trick me as much as I didn't see the fix coming. I didn't, I didn't see where he was going to go. I was like, how in the hell are they going to get out of this? And when they finally got out of it, I was like, okay, I got it. It takes some suspension of disbelief and, you know, you have to let the author do his thing in the universe that he's created, but I got, I got there. I was there with him. I suspect that in, in the near future, we're going to, we're going to see longer books from Crouch. I feel that way. I don't know if that'll be the case or not, but I'm excited to see this new style because I'm not a huge fan of Wendix, Chuck Wendix style, nor was I a huge fan of Blake Crouch's style. The thing that kept me with Blake Crouch was his storytelling was so amazing. I was there for the storytelling and not so much the sentence fragments with Chuck Wendix. I never cared too much for either. I like the dude, follow him on Twitter. I just never cared for his, his fiction. But with this one, I think we're moving to a different, he's evolving again, and I love to watch an author evolve. I don't know if you guys have read any Blake Crouch, if you've been fans of his for a while, let me know down there in the doobly-doo whether or not you felt the same way I did. If you were disappointed, let me know why you were disappointed if you gave up. Let me know where you gave up, but give me all those comments down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U, this has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye. Man, it is lot of Jersey. It is, it's hot. I have no idea how hot it is here. I think it's more humid than anything. But anyways, yeah, spoiler alert. This is for spoilers for recursion. I should have brought a towel with me out here. I'm out in the office. It's not connected to the, to the house. So if you guys want to, what are you talking about out here? Basically, it's a shed. We turned this shed out here in the doohickey. We turned this son of a bitch into an office, and we put some walling up, walling up, and we put a desk out here, put some bookshelves. Now we got ourselves what we call an office. No. But okay, so let's talk. The only bit of spoiler talk that I want to go into is a scene I was talking about. I think it's like chapter 47, 46, something like that. I could be completely wrong. But there's a scene where there's a nuclear explosion off in the distance, and it's just close enough to affect the two main characters. Well, when they get, when it hits them, they end up with like automatic radiation poisoning and burns and whatnot. They're touching things. Their skin's peeling off. They're, they're rushing to get this, to get the, the female lead back to the chair to travel again. And then, you know, but this, they're, they're basically, they're dying is what's going on. And that whole scene, man, that scene, that scene screwed me up. I was, I was like, are they actually going to make it? Because you never know with Crouch, Crouch will throw a curveball actually there at the last minute and end up killing, you know, a main character or something. So I wasn't sure if they were going to make it. I wasn't sure if he was going to make it, if she was going to make it. What was going to happen? And then the ending finally came and they had to go into a, the false, the fault, they had to go, remember a false memory. And I don't know, I don't know why I didn't think about that. But it, it fit into the, into the universe and the science that he had built. I feel it fit there, but some fantastic character writing there at the end, because there's not a whole lot going on after the nuclear explosion. It turns into kind of like a Groundhog Day scenario. But after that, man, it, it slowed down, but I was still invested in these characters. And I know, you know, reading Crouch before, and this is not to knock the guy, you know, I mean, there's plenty of people who can tell a terrific story, maybe not the best character development. But I noticed in Dark Matter, his character development had, you know, gone through the roof from pines. In this one, it's even better. It's more of a character driven piece and there's less action in this one, which is a huge chance risk on his part, because people are used to his books moving, you know, a mile a minute kind of deal. But with this one, I, I was so impressed. It felt like, and this is odd kind of, you know, I'm not best friends with the guy or anything, but I'm, I'm, I'm proud to see him stepping up his game and, you know, growing, I guess is the best way. And it's kind of like, you know, with Stephen King, you can see the progression of Stephen King's career when he got better and better and better. And that's, I feel like I'm watching another Stephen King. It's a different genre, of course, but I feel like I'm watching another Stephen King as Blake Crouch, you know, just gets better and better. And it's really awesome to see that, especially since he's kind of left, you know, J.A. Conrath, you know, J.A. Conrath is over here spinning his wheels and, you know, he's every single, he's basically turned into the James Patterson of the, of the Indie market. And then you have Blake Crouch over here, you know, moving off on his own thing. It's nice to see this dude doing that, you know, pulling it away and actually, you know, challenging himself, writing new stuff, bigger concepts. I dig that. I like that a lot. Anyways, so that's all I have to say. If you have any spoilers to talk about down there in the doobly-doo, please put spoiler alert up there so nobody ends up coming, you know, across and it's like, uh-oh, but yeah, this book's out today. If you're here in the spoiler section, go buy the book.