Matt McAvoy Book Review

I won’t lie, it was a slightly tough read, this fantasy thriller from Nick Nielsen.  Not because he isn’t a good writer, by any means; quite the contrary, in fact, he is an exceptionally good writer – in fact, I think this might actually be the issue for me; he is too good.  This is a great story, with some fantastic writing, tremendously well edited, but, if I’m being as obtuse and simple about it as I can, the book simply felt too long.  There is an exceptional number of words – so many, in fact, that I realized at one point the narrative was actually moving at a slower pace than real time, such is the minutiae level of detail in this book.  We share every single thought, every action, every feeling with the profoundly layered main character.  The detail is so intricate, in fact, that very long periods of page-time pass between events.  Don’t get me wrong; this is a wonderful book for those who like to read meticulous creative writing, but I actually found myself so distracted by the continuous long action that I was forgetting what the characters were actually doing from one scene to the next.

The story itself is thinly applied, yet actually quite involved, about a career criminal who finds himself supernaturally chosen to survive a terrible disaster, then pursued by unstoppable beings, for a hugely significant reason he finds out later.  Like I said, it turns out to be a very good story, but it takes an incredibly long time unfolding, and so wordy in between its bullet points that it feels somewhat diluted, which is a bit frustrating; to tell the truth, the book would have been significantly more gripping and easy to follow with a sizeable word cut.  For this reason, it actually felt overall like a chase thriller, and I was struggling a touch to keep a grip.  The narrative key points make up a tiny percentage of the content, the vast majority of it pursuit action.  This proportional discrepancy, for me, undermines this book’s otherwise tremendous qualities, and indeed those of its writer.

I don’t want to appear critical of Faith; it is a work of genuine talent, by a smart author, and part of what I think is going to be a promising series.  It would be very interesting, I think, to read this book with much of the superfluous trimmed, focusing more heavily on the story, for to me that imbalance is this book’s single biggest problem.  If you can see past that, and are able to utterly immerse yourself in a highly descriptive narrative, without distraction – and indeed enjoy this type of writing – I think you’ll enjoy this book a great deal, particularly if you’re a fan of reluctant and unwholesome heroes, end-days threats and Dean Koontz-style supernatural chase thrillers.