Theatre of the Gods by M. Suddain

Theatre of the gods, written by M Suddain, is a book revolving around the adventures of explorer M. Francisco Fabrigas, a mysterious captain called The Necronaut, a blind alien girl, a deaf boy and a suspicious botanist. From what I could pick up most of their adventures consist of interplanetary and inter-universal journeys to strange and perilous places in which they are constantly on the brink of death. The book is told from the perspective of a supposed interviewer who has brought upon himself the task of extracting and documenting M. Francisco Fabrigas's many tales. Fabrigas himself is over a thousand years old and spends most of the story miraculously avoiding death despite how much he wants his adventures to be over with.

   Despite my relatively short attention span, I found myself actually enjoying this book and its wide variety of quirky, mildly amusing characters (my favourite character was the Pope of the Holy Neon Empire who I always imagined as being a bit of a mix between a homunculus and an insolent child). The book is also intertwined with little nods and hints towards the books, movies and celebrities of our own world which helped to ground the book and make it just a bit easier to understand. Generally the book was written quite well and surprisingly clearly considering its incredibly fast pace. There were some points in the book that didn't seem to have much point to them but that could have simply been me zoning out and then realising I hadn't been paying attention to the last few pages. One must also be prepared for how intense this book is, I personally believe that the title should have a subheading: 620 pages of madness as this is definitely a far more accurate representation of what lies ahead when you pick this book up off the shelf.

   After reading this book I tried my best to liken it to any books I have previously read, but the only thing it held any resemblance to was the books of the Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett, which feature a similar fantastical otherworldly theme and rapid pace*. This is the only similar style of writing I know of and would therefore recommend it to anyone who has read the Discworld series or anything like it. This book would also sit well with those particularly interested in either science fiction or adventure genres. However I would argue that this book is definitely not suitable for any one under the age of twelve. This is only because of how fast paced and absolutely fantastical this book is.

*With the singular exception of the distinct lack of inordinately long and rambling footnotes that contain a supreme excess of words and a distinct lack of tangible sentences and full stops and serve only to explain how the books current events relate to some other previous happening which is often in one of the preceding books.