There is a notorious parable about a swept and garnished house. This novel feels more approachable than Queen , with greater transparency of language. It's constructed like a high-class thriller, where various sinister tentacles all prove to be connected to one big and ugly core. There are horrid deaths by botched nanotech body-transformation, obscurely linked to a very rich man's inexplicable suicide. The bells of hell can be heard tolling loudly as one bright young executive is inducted into a high-level corporate Inner Ring, from which death is the only exit and whose plans for eternity go far beyond the simple ideas of survivalist cults.
Narrative tension builds and builds.
Towards the end, it's difficult not to turn the pages with compulsive speed. Let Slant keep its best secrets for now. Bear has woven some clever stuff together here, including a kind of hive mentality some orders of magnitude beyond Douglas Hofstadter's anthill example, and an interesting view of Tourette's Syndrome which may owe a little to Oliver Sacks. All ends as a good thriller should, with satisfying explanations, a litter of corpses, scarred survivors, healing, mating and renewal. The sinister underside of the narrative does not, however, go away.