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Furnace: Fugitives by Alexander Gordon Smith (view source)
Revision as of 19:43, 29 August 2020
, 19:43, 29 August 2020no edit summary
It has taken three books for Alex to get out of prison. He wouldn't have been there if the powers-that-be hadn't framed him for murder, and he would have found it a better experience were it a regular prison. But no. Over those three books we have seen just what lives and works in the completely subterranean nightmare - The Warden, Mr Furnace, and the evil creatures they are both making, breeding and employing down there. But the whole experience has come at a cost. Alex has been around these evil men too much, and they are changing him too - making him one of their tools. It's only now, on the outside for the first time, that Alex gets a clearer picture of just how many tools there are - and just how much evil has been spread.
These books have been spread through with action and violence. The only one I have read before now, [[Furnace: Death Sentence by Alexander Gordon Smith|the third, Death Sentence]], featured gore and fighting aplenty, with a teenage fiction approach to body horror. But just because a successful escape has happened, there's no need for you to suspect a moment's peace. Here are attacks on cathedrals, escapes with stolen Humvees chased by helicopter gunships, and forever our likable likeable hero Alex is finding his biology altering, with the evils of Nectar coursing through it - making him nastier, more muscular, and basically a pumped-up hybrid.
And even outside the prison institution , there is nastiness. The whole city is besieged - by what, whom, how and why takes both this book and the series closer, due spring 2011, to tell. This is not a sunny, light-hearted read by any stretch of the imagination.
I did think last time that the series might lose something by leaving the prison, and in a way it has. The outside world shows Furnace as just another fascistic army-building madman, and his aims, and weapons, a little more like the regular kind of freakishness we've seen in other books before. But Smith has the nous to keep the compelling writing style flowing, the gutsy action and gripping consequences fully to the fore. There's a darkness about the telling once more, from the scenes in the cathedral to the horrors on the subway platform, that means we're ploughed through any impatience to hit the climax with nare a breath.