Amber Herbert reviewed XX by Rian Hughes
Intriguing Concept and Design, Dull in Story and Execution
3 stars
I picked this up after someone compared it to Danielewski's House of Leaves. This novel reeled me in with its first contact premise. The graphics and typography are cool but offer little to the already-lacking story. Once I hit the third volume of the eight-part "novella within a novel", I dipped out. While Hughes has a knack for crafting a sentence and designing graphic content, the story was too shallow, meandering, and repetitive for me to power through another 600 pages. It doesn't help that some of the fonts were impossible to read on an e-reader.
I picked this up after someone compared it to Danielewski's House of Leaves. This novel reeled me in with its first contact premise. The graphics and typography are cool but offer little to the already-lacking story. Once I hit the third volume of the eight-part "novella within a novel", I dipped out. While Hughes has a knack for crafting a sentence and designing graphic content, the story was too shallow, meandering, and repetitive for me to power through another 600 pages. It doesn't help that some of the fonts were impossible to read on an e-reader.