Inside Man
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4.2 • 13개의 평가
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- US$4.99
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- US$4.99
출판사 설명
K. J. Parker returns to the amoral world of Prosper’s Demon with a wry, sardonic novella that flips the eternal, rule-governed battle between men and demons on its head.
An anonymous representative of the Devil, once a high-ranking Duke of Hell and now a committed underachiever, has spent the last forever of an eternity leading a perfectly tedious existence distracting monks from their liturgical devotions. It’s interminable, but he prefers it that way, now that he’s been officially designated by Downstairs as “fragile.” No, he won’t elaborate.
All that changes when he finds himself ensnared, along with a sadistic exorcist, in a labyrinthine plot to subvert the very nature of Good and Evil. In such a circumstance, sympathy for the Devil is practically inevitable.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nothing goes quite right for the snarky, charming demon narrating this oppressively bleak fantasy from Parker, his second set in the monarchy-dominated, demon-infested world of Prosper's Demon. The unnamed demon, once a top field agent in Hell's endless bureaucracy, has been reclassified as "officially fragile" and reassigned to the lighter duty of tempting monks to slip up while reciting their prayers. The narrator's fragility is the result of years of excruciating torture at the hands of a brutal and powerful exorcist, whom the narrator possessed from when the boy was a fetus until age 17. Following a surprise reunion with the exorcist, the narrator is offered an unpleasant new assignment: he can work together with the exorcist to orchestrate a possession on which the entire divine Plan rests, or consign himself to an eternity of mindless desk duty. The distinctive voice is a bright spot as the plot meanders through an endless series of flashbacks, musings, and asides. The supporting cast, meanwhile, remains largely undeveloped and unsympathetic throughout. Fans of book one will appreciate getting to see things from the demon's perspective this time around, but there's not much else here to keep the pages turning.
사용자 리뷰
If it hadn’t been a sequel…
This doesn’t seem like the same universe as Prosper’s Demon. The characters are clearly supposed to be the same, but He is now an infernal bureaucrat who is motivated not by any sort of spite but by orders alone, and who gets caught secretly praying because He misses God. You know—the demon who put the exorcist in a situation to kill his baby niece, out of revenge. And the exorcist seems to be quite unsurprised now that demons are bureaucratic punch-clock villains, instead of being something of a monster because the only consistent presences in his life were monsters. It makes you wonder if Her plan was actually anything bad.
I know KJ Parker writes unreliable narrators, but if this book is to be believed, the exorcist was simply lying to the narrative about basically everything about the cosmology and the demons’ personalities, and also making decisions that make very little sense. This doesn’t seem like a sequel, it seems like an alternate universe using one of the same characters (I am not entirely willing to take this specific demon as being Him, even though He very clearly is supposed to be; there’s no real cruelty in His nature). It invested me on its own, but it kept nagging at me when each new thing trampled all over the previous book, which was a lovely story about a terrible person doing a terrible thing to avert a harm that was entirely undefined but so many years in the making that you had to imagine it would be the worst thing in the world.
I would have very much liked to read the version of this book that was actually set in the last book’s setting, I think. But instead the setting and characters have been bent into shape for this plot, and here we go. The writing is wonderful, as always. The problem isn’t the writing. Except, possibly, for the ending, which is very KJ Parker except in that it leaves precisely no feeling that all of this mattered despite the way it went wrong.