Just finished Fractal Noise and uhh... Why does that book exist? I'm being fully serious. It's addressed at the end that it was inspired by a dream and originally started as a 15 page short story. It should have stayed that way. Not trying to be too negative but holy crap that's 3 hours of my life I can never get back.

Sure you can make the argument it's a mirror of Dante's Inferno, paralleling traversing the levels of hell while also moving through the stages of grief. I get it's meant to be more of a character study but the prose is purple in all the wrong ways. There is no actual real character development other than "I guess I don't want to die now?" For... Reasons? The characters were also so shallow there wasn't really anything to study?

There is absolutely no broader connection to the Fractalverse, no real insight into TSiaSoS. Knowing it's a prequel I was hoping for some kind of setup or tie-in. We didn't get it. It was just... Walking... For 200 pages, with some weird heavy-handed attempt at religious commentary thrown in and characters who (well I don't even know if they were acting out of character because we know nothing about them).

I'm just bummed. I enjoyed TSiaSoS. I was looking forward to more world-building. Instead we got what felt like a writing exercise in self-gratification that never should have been published. I'm really disappointed. I haven't actively disliked a book this much in a long time.

Curious what the consensus was.