Review: Close Enough to Reality to Cause Cold Sweat
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 28, 2014
OK, just what does one do when confronted with overwhelming force? Chris Nuttall's answer: go down swinging. And even if the good guys lose -- as they do here -- the bad guys know they've been one h--l of a fight."The Fall of Night" begins in a manner very reminiscent of Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising." There are plot parallels, but they diverge as one goes along. Clancy ends with "the good guys" triumphant. Not here, though. The end is gut-wrenching and leaves a rather hollow feeling inside. There are a couple of events, however, which give one hope that not all is lost in the long run. (Read the book to find out what they are!)The quality of the writing is quite good. The author has claimed that this is one of his earlier books. Maybe so, but I've read some of his "later" efforts, and this one seems much smoother to me. There aren't the speed bumps -- poor word choice, continuity errors, name confusion -- that seem to crop up all too often. I'd suspect that there was a good bit of careful and commendable copy editing before this edition reached the market.One aspect of storytelling that Chris Nuttall excels at: characters. You may not like the men and women he writes about, and few of them are unalloyed heroes/heroines or villains/villainesses. (Villainesses is so a word!) Still, they seem real in the sense that they have a existence beyond the written page; one can understand their motivations. Some of those motivations are, quite truthfully, astonishing, e.g., the heroic Russian sabotage agent and the travel passes. Yes, the ending is a bit of a downer, although leavened by the reunion of two of the more admirable (but still very human) characters."The Fall of Night" is a novel that begs for a sequel. I'm not too sure that a three-volume series is indicated, or perhaps only two: one to get into the bleakest of situations, and another to get out of it. It'll be interesting to see which way Mr. Nuttall jumps.If you're a lover of rattlin' good yarns, you'll like this one!