What is dash reading?

I was a bookish child

I know you wonder, so here's the low-down.

I've mentioned John C. Wright before, praising some of the essays on his website, but I am currently reading his novel Awake In The Nightland and while I'm not a huge fan of the epic fantasy genre, having read little of it other than Tolkein, I have to say that this book is, well, fantastic. Perhaps even epic.

Using The Lord of the Rings as a yardstick, imagine an alternative ending wherein Sauron had not been defeated, but had conquered all of Middle Earth and brought on a million years of darkness. (I am using this as an example, a frame of reference; this is not an alt-lit version of LOTR, not at all.)

Not only figurative, but literal darkness, and that ensconced in The Last Redoubt, a 7 mile high pyramid powered by a dwindling Earth Current, the remnant of humanity--the only source of light remaining on Earth--lives cloistered awaiting their prophesied demise. Outside roam creatures of the darkness: night hounds, abhumans and incorporeal beings of despair. The Last Redoubt itself has been besieged since time immemorial by the Great Watching Things: huge, nearly immobile maleficent creatures who only react to the presence of a human, walking abroad in the Night Land; something that very rarely occurs.

In the present generation of humans, no one quite believes the old tales of a time when there was a great and a lesser light over all the Earth, when the Night sky was alive with stars, when men walked freely abroad in the land. A few, however, have dreams and visions of this past. Trouble ensues.

It is a fascinating tale, very well written, perhaps even beautiful in style despite the grimness. I am currently only (and thanks to the wonder of Kindle, I know this with precision) 38% of the way through the story and I can honestly say that I have no idea where he's taking me with the story.

Sometimes, in a book that grips you early on, you carry somewhere in that back of your mind the hope that the author won't disappoint you with an unsatisfactory ending. In this case, I don't even care (although I suspect he won't disappoint), the strange framework and the lovely, almost poetic prose is worth the journey.