Paths Not Taken

Nightside, Book 5

By: Simon R. Green

Narrated by: Dan Calley

I'm John Taylor. I was born in the Nightside, that square mile in the hidden center of London where it is always the hour of the wolf, where gods and monsters walk side by side, and where every dark question ever asked can be answered—for a price.

I left for a while, but I did come back, to make my living doing what I do better than anyone else: finding things—lost or stolen, real or imaginary.

Recently, I found the most dangerous thing of all: the true identity of my long-gone mother. Turns out she's a being who's been around since before the dawn of history. Then, she created the Nightside—and now, for her own warped reasons, she intends to destroy it.

To stop her before she even gets started, I've got to do some hard traveling—back in time, through endless eons, into the very distant—and probably deadly—past...

©2005 Simon R. Green (P)2022 Tantor

Circular reasoning

This book is a great take on time travel and how complicated it would be to navigate. Great story

The dreaded time travel installment

“I hate time travel- it makes my head hurt.”
Me too, Suzie, me too.

“You know, we are getting into some pretty deep philosophical waters here, Suzie.”
“Yeah, you could drown in waters like these.”
Judging by all the self aware observations, even the author understood the unfortunate perils of his time travel plot. Other than Bill and Ted, time travel episodes in any series annoy me. They try to impress with alternate futures and MC doppelgängers, but ultimately are just ink blot pictures created by the author’s shotgun blast against the wall: the story is whatever you make of it. Without rhyme or reason, when all the world and character building is thrown out the window, I got desensitized with all the blah, blah, blah new time-periods and redshirts that were here today, gone from the series, never to be seen again.

“Angels were spiritual stormtroopers.”
While that is an admittedly awesome metaphor, combining a Heaven and Hell plot with a time travel plot only made my head hurt even more. Worse: I slogged through an entire book only to discover the blatantly obvious, and supremely underwhelming, reason why John’s mother created Nightside.

“Monsters need to stick together.”
Sigh. Two filler books in a row. Unless you are really, really invested in hearing John and Susie’s romantic Han Solo moment, I’d recommend you skip this and just listen to the recap in the next book, which thankfully finally dispenses with the ‘who’s your mama’ arc.

Repetitive And Contrived

Thr world the author created is pretty interesting and the various characters are all intriguing but the reperepetitive nature of the "internal commentary" from book to book and chapter to chapter is a bit tiresome. I'm almost left feeling like these are filler lines to draw out the word count. Especially when the internal commentary (in many cases) is followed up by the same information being shared externally with the other characters. This is fine when what the main (focal) character is thinking one thing but saying another, but these stories more often than not repeats the exact same dialogue both internally and externally. Last annoyance is the main character reprepeatedly saying they will do what ever it takes to prevent the problem while doing exactly the stuff that creates the problem. Too bad because I really like the world and most of the characters.