Necronomicon, The Long Utopia and Steelheart

Necronomicon is a compilation of readings of various stories by HP Lovecraft. There no particular theme to the collection, which encompasses most of the classics ('The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space', 'The Shadow out of Time' et al, although not 'At the Mountains of Madness' or 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'), but the resulting collection is 21 hours of very well read Lovecraftian horror, and like many first person narratives, Lovecraftian horror benefits greatly from a good reader.

The absence of 'At the Mountains of Madness' is the greatest omission, presumably because it's chunky enough to be published on its own. Other than that, the main problem with this and other Audible short story collections is the lack of any easily accessible indexing. If I wanted to go back and relisten to 'The Horror at Red Hook', I'd have to take pot luck.

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The fourth book in the Long Earth sequence, The Long Utopia shares with its predecessors a combination of intricate world-building and faintly half-arsed plotting aimed more at making a philosophical point than servicing a conventional narrative. Each book jumps ahead five to ten years and seems to spend most of its bulk catching us up on what's happened in the interim rather than moving the story forward in any meaningful sense. The multitude of viewpoints also serves to distance the reader instead of increasing involvement, and the whole thing ends up rather dry. It feels that the series as a whole would have been better served by either abandoning conventional narrative altogether to create a pseudohistory, or more rigorously enmeshing the cosmological musings with the story of a specific set of characters.

It's rare that I have a serious complaint about Audible readings, and I have nothing but respect for Michael Fenton Stevens as an actor, but honestly the fact that so much of the book is set in America - and that Fenton Stevens range encompasses few, if any, convincing American accents - makes the choice of a British reader frankly baffling.

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The nature of its own purpose and identity is not one that Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart shares. Sanderson's superhero deconstruction, the first of a series - The Reckoners - set in a world in which superhumans have appeared and proven to be universally megalomaniacs who despise ordinary humans and lesser 'Epics' for their weakness, is unabashed dark fantasy. In the city of Newcago - formerly Chicago - the word of Steelheart is law and humanity lives as an underclass in the transformed remnants of their old world. The Reckoners are the ones who fight back, humans who hunt Epics, and newcomer David thinks that they should be setting their sights on bigger game.

Steelheart is a pacy adventure, as well as a deconstructionist musing on the nature of absolute power. It's not a breathtaking work of existential genius, but it would be surprised if anyone expected it to be, and that is to its credit.