There are few survivors, among them Ezechiel, an assassin with strange gifts and a pair of living whips who finds himself protecting a mysterious boy; Mark, a man consumed by the need to communicate with his other selves in other universes; Marius, a Ghost disconnected from society and other human beings; a genetically-enhanced woman named Eve, who betrayed her Leader, Adam, with respect to a project called “Apple”; Joshua, the escaped test subject she rescued; and a Satanic figure called Deliah, who seeks to unmake the world bit by bit. As the survivors slowly piece together the shards of their world (or seek to tear it apart further), they discover that their universe may be doomed to fly off into nothingness, due to lack of connections between people. Can they bring it back to stability and existence? Should they?
This is an enigmatic book, full of symbolism and meaning hidden just underneath the surface. The author is a fine descriptive writer, and manages to portray a dystopian future or alternate universe (it’s rather unclear which) with disturbing force. The world portrayed is complicated, intriguingly different from and yet similar to our own, and deserves even greater exploration than the author devotes to it. The characters, plot and context are multifaceted, mysterious, and revealed to us in passing glimpses, intriguing the reader and leading us to go on in hopes of learning more.
However, the very mysterious quality of the book that intrigues the reader makes it rather hard to understand. The plot jumps from place to place and character to character, and the connecting threads are tenuous at best. There is little exploration of many aspects of this new world, such as the “Collective,” the “Laterali,” or even the Spire that forms the focus of the book, and one only gets a tentative idea of what the Apple project was all about. Characters come into the story and are killed or depart seemingly randomly, with little sense of their importance to the tale. More explanation and backstory are needed to give the story its full power and to truly reach the reader.
Fallen Spire is a thought-provoking and interesting book, and will appeal to those who like to delve into symbolism and mystery.
Reviewed by Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader