"Terminus" by Peter Clines--Fiction Review

So Obscurists, this is a big day—yes, I know it’s black Friday—but no, not that. According to my almighty spreadsheet, today is the day I have posted 100 full reviews here on WIO. So that means you could scroll back through this blog, read all of them, get a pretty good gist of them, and then you could claim at, I don’t know, let’s say parties that you’ve read all those books—sorta. Do people still do parties? I’ve not gone outside for a very long time. 

It also means that if you took the time to print out all 100 reviews, spread them out on your floor, and rolled around on them naked—you’re undoubtedly a serial killer. Please stop doing that.

In any case, so what are we going to talk about today? Oh! I know—how about a book? I started this book blog reviewing “14” by Peter Clines, one of my favorite authors, so it only feels right that my 100th review should be one of his books. So today, we’re talking about “Terminus.”

***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***

What I love about this book:

So, “Terminus” is actually book four of Clines’s “Threshold Universe” series, but the nature of this series is such that I don’t feel it’s a big deal to jump ahead to wherever. Normally such a statement from me would be sacrilegious—so you might ask yourself—did I do that? Jump from book two to book four? No, of course not. I’m not a book heretic. So explanation time, Clines writes each of these books as standalone stories, typically with whole new casts of characters, with maybe some cameos from other stories sprinkled in. They all share the same universe, but they’re not really unified narratives like you’d expect with most book series.

What is the actual throughline through these books—and clearly, I find this very clever—are the stories’ antagonists instead of the protagonists. Each book still works in the traditional model of meeting, following, and rooting for the protagonists of each individual book, but they get swapped out each story. Whereas the more monstrous characters are omnipresent in each story. They’re slower to take the stage in the narrative in the first two books but ramp up with each novel, and by the time we get to “Terminus,” shit hits the fan nearly immediately.

There are my usual loves about Clines’s writing present in this book. I love listening to his characters talk and who they are, and of course, I read the audiobook version, which is read by my favorite narrator Ray Porter—and I’m gushing.

Also, there are more direct ties in this book to “14” than any other in the series, and “14” is still my favorite book I’ve read as an adult—maybe ever—it’s hard to say.

What I don’t love about this book:

This book gets very far away from having a central protagonist—or main character, if you will. Typically, that isn’t something that I’d even bring up and doesn’t bother me when other novels do it, but by the end of “14,” I knew its characters very well. I liked them, and I enjoyed listening to them go about their exploration of their building together, and how they deepened their friendships was nice. It made it all the more wrenching when they started dying and getting hurt. A lot of that sense of community and that community suddenly being threatened isn’t present in this book.

The characters are good, don’t get me wrong, it’s just we’re meeting them all for the first time—we don’t spend lots of time with them temporally from their perspective—this story is largely about one really bad day—and they never seem to like each other all that much. So when people start dying, it’s not as impactful. As much as I liked that sailor dude, his shocking death hits like, “oh, well, that sucks.” But not with soul-crushing sadness. Also, calm down. That isn’t a spoiler, there are tons of sailor dudes in this book, and many die. It’s more of a generalized statement about this novel rather than a specific plot point.

This preview is an Amazon Affiliate link; 

as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases

Author’s Website: http://thoth-amon.blogspot.com/

***The Spoiler part of this review***

***Ye be warned to turn back now***

The quick and dirty synopsis:

“Terminus” begins with Murdoch listening to a minister talking to her new congregation—the Family—on a beach. He’d apparently been involved with minister Anne when they were younger. She had recently returned to the faith, having had her faith in the Great Ones confirmed during the events of “The Fold,” the second book in this series. It turns out that the antagonist of “14” was her brother. He had failed to destroy the machine, really the whole building the characters in “14” live in—but Anne has a new plan. One she is sure will destroy the machine keeping the Great Ones from coming through to Earth.

"14," by Peter Clines--Fiction Review

I wanted my first review to be of “14” by Peter Clines.

***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***

What I love about this book:

It’s neo-Lovecraftian horror that somehow manages to feel very light, like an episode of friends that takes an unexpected hardcore turn into Cthulu-Ville.  I also love its ensemble cast of characters who are all compelling in their own ways. Finally, and the biggest reason I love this book, I’m enchanted by the vocal talents of its narrator, Ray Porter, for the audiobook edition—yes, I’m one of those.

“14” does exactly what I want in modern-day cosmic horror. It keeps all the stakes of perception stretching nightmares, and it updates the characters to make them more relatable than just the stuffy professor type who stumbles upon a moldy old book. So, when bad things start happening to the characters, you genuinely care about their fates. Lovecraft, a pioneer of stories like this, didn’t always bother to name his characters, making it hard to care about them when things from beyond the veil of ordinary reality drove them insane. Oh no—that… guy—went nuts and jumped out of a window! I will forever remember fondly how frightened he was of fish people. 

I credit Peter Clines for reawakening my enthusiasm for writing and great storytelling at a time when I had walked away from this art form. It is my favorite novel that I’ve read as an adult, it’s the first book I always recommend, and you should buy it.

What I don’t love about this book:

There isn’t much of anything I don’t like about “14,” which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect work of literature—I don’t believe perfection is possible. Subjectively, for me, all of its constituent elements of plot and character development work in a way I find pleasing. I often find myself picking a random moment in the story and relistening to the rest of the book from there—yes, sometimes that’s the very beginning—in an attempt to inhabit that headspace I experienced the first time I read the novel. Now I get that this is starting to sound like more reasons why I love this book, dear probably no other human being ever until aliens from Alpha Centauri are sifting through the wreckage of our collapsed society and only come across my blog to ascertain what our culture was like reader. But, where I’m going with this is with great familiarity inevitably, you can’t help but see little defects.

First off, as much as I love the dialog between characters, there are a few kitschy moments. The major one I’m thinking of is one character mentions Torchwood—which I’ve never seen, and I’m sure is a lovely program—but nobody in a group of people greater than three, who vary wildly in demographics, such as age group, asks, “what’s that again?” Everyone gets it, and the banter continues without missing a beat, which was probably a conscious decision by the author to keep the flow going, but I’d argue it feels a tad inauthentic.

This leads to my next point, every character, who are the protagonists—or orbit the protagonists in a friendly way, share essentially the same sense of humor, a light form of sarcastic gallows, which if you’ve read the preceding paragraphs, you’ll understand why it resonates with me. Groups of friends do tend to have similar senses of humor but are less likely, to have the exact same sense of humor, differences in experiences make that sort of thing unlikely. This means that how the characters talk doesn’t always sound exactly like how people actually talk. I would also argue that in fiction, we don’t really want characters to talk precisely how people actually speak in the real world, because real-world people do things like, um, you know add words and things improbably, and like, um, incorrectly, and repetitively, while sorta babbling on, stalling for time, because they sorta drift off, forgetting their original, you know, point they were driving at, at the beginning of their run-on sentence.

This preview is an Amazon Affiliate link; 

as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases

Author's Website: https://www.peterclines.com/

***The Spoiler part of this review***

***Ye be warned to turn back now***

The quick and dirty synopsis:

The story opens with a man running away from a group of people while bleeding to death. He knows he’s going to die and is cool with it, just so long as the mysterious people don’t catch him and get him to reveal something that would kill everyone—not a few people, or a lot of people, all the people.