CBR5 #12 - Intentional Dissonance, Iain Thomas

This book is hard to explain. There is only one city left on the Earth. Somewhere in the future things went wrong and now there is one city in the world. There are people trapped in teleporting loops living out the same 10 to 20 seconds of their lives over and over again on the street right in front of everyone. There are tree people and regular people with gifts, and the government pumps anti depressants into the water system to keep people from offing themselves. There is a black marker for the drug Saudade, which is sadness. There's every variety of sadness: just lost your dog sadness, lost a parent, remember your favorite thing that you'll never see or feel again, the list goes on.

Our protagonist, Jon Salt, is addicted to sadness. His friend, Emily, supplies him. John is in love with Michelle. Jon has a gift. He can make people see things, not any things, personal things. Whatever personally will affect them the way Jon wants them to be affected is what appears before them. He uses this gift to perform illegal "magic" shows to get by. He lives on the fringes, not totally understanding his gift, and spending most of his time in a melancholy stupor.

There is, of course, a bad guy. A Doctor who wants to use Jon's power to finish what he started when the world "ended". Most of the book centers around the chase. The Doctor in pursuit of John, in pursuit of more Saudade and Michelle. Eventually, it becomes evident that nothing is as it seems.

The story is interesting and offers a few surprises. the first 2/3 of the book move along and have some very haunting moments. The last third of the book struggles. It feels like the finish is rushed, and more is explained to get through the finish than shown. Moments that make for scenes in the early part of the book reduced to one-sentence explanation of how we got here. A little it reminded me of crime procedural on network TV, that stilted dialogue they use to explain all the events in case the viewer missed anything.

I took a writing workshop with a woman many years ago, and her first comment with almost every piece was, "I wish this would have ended sooner". Me too.