The Wake by Scott Snyder
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This story started awesome and then turned weird. And not the good kind of weird with like, I don’t know, aliens that look like huge ballsacks. Weird where you kind of don’t know what’s going on, and kind of don’t care. I found myself reading the ending, knowing that I didn’t really understand what was happening, but also not giving a hot damn. You could just feel it was one of those endings that’s like, “Look, I wrote myself into a bit of a corner, but it’s the journey, not the destination, right?”
Well, no. It’s both. I love a good journey, but when you set up a mysterious journey with lots of emphasis put on how cool it’s going to be when we fulfill the ancient prophecy or whatever, then yeah, there’s an element of destination there too.
Also, this is the second Snyder story (the first being Batman: Court of Owls) that relies on characters basically tripping balls all the time, which I do not care for. There’s just a part of my brain that doesn’t respond to hallucinating alongside a character. Because they’re hallucinating, I’m sober as hell. It feels like when you drive a carful of drunk people home. They’re having a great time, laughing and having these deep conversations, and you’re just like, “I wonder if I let go of the wheel and hit the gas what fate would have in store…”
Maybe these books need to have a little tape that goes with, and the tape narrates the book and makes noises when you turn the pages, and also a noise when you should ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms in order to experience this better. Or at least signal that you should read this next part when you’re altered in some way, maybe you set an alarm to 4 AM and wake up and read these pages, then go back to sleep and have to wonder if what you read was real.