Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle

I had breakfast with Sean this morning-- he was in LA to do some business stuff, so I hauled him off to a cafe-- so it's not like my notes on this book will be at all impartial. (Note to Green Man folk: write to Gavin Grant and ask for a review copy, so someone who is not an old friend of the author can review it.) All the same, I was a fan of Sean's before I met him in person, and even if I never had I would still think PERFECT CIRCLE was a remarkable book.

Will "Dead" Kennedy has the sort of life you wish you could wake up from. He's a Texas punk who shaved off his Mohawk when it started to recede. His wife left him when she was pregnant and married an ex-Marine. He just got fired from his latest dead-end job, this time for eating cat food at Petco. And he sees dead people: his cousin AJ, murdered at 22 by her ex-boyfriend. His uncle Billy, vaporized in an accident at the petroleum plant. A dead girl tied up under the sink.

Ghosts come back because they want something, or because living people want something from them: murder victims looking for revenge, or accident victims pulled back by someone's guilty conscience. Will can't tell if his life has been a long slow slide downhill because he didn't want anything enough, or he didn't get to keep the one thing he wanted.

He sees AJ reflected in mirrors and windows and CD cases, and regrets that he never loved a woman enough to kill her.

Will sees ghost roads as well as the ghosts of people, pathways into the black and white world of the dead. He walked down one once, and almost didn't make it back. PERFECT CIRCLE is a ghost road into territory that most books don't explore at all, or at least not from the angle that Sean takes. It's scary, though not because of the ghosts; disturbing on all sorts of different levels; and written like a song, with images and phrases which recur as refrains, changing with the context and gathering emotional weight as they go. The colors of the living world shine bright against the monochrome of death.

And I see that he finally got to use Neal Stephenson's "Stephen King meets Ibsen" blurb. It's still appropriate. Especially when you recall that Stephen King is often quite funny. But that's not what you remember about his books when you put them down.

Ordering information and extracts at are at http://www.seanstewart.org/novels/perfectcircle/

The author's notes for the individual books at http://www.seanstewart.org/ are well worth reading. Especially the one for GALVESTON.

Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle

I had breakfast with Sean this morning-- he was in LA to do some business stuff, so I hauled him off to a cafe-- so it's not like my notes on this book will be at all impartial. (Note to Green Man folk: write to Gavin Grant and ask for a review copy, so someone who is not an old friend of the author can review it.) All the same, I was a fan of Sean's before I met him in person, and even if I never had I would still think PERFECT CIRCLE was a remarkable book.

Will "Dead" Kennedy has the sort of life you wish you could wake up from. He's a Texas punk who shaved off his Mohawk when it started to recede. His wife left him when she was pregnant and married an ex-Marine. He just got fired from his latest dead-end job, this time for eating cat food at Petco. And he sees dead people: his cousin AJ, murdered at 22 by her ex-boyfriend. His uncle Billy, vaporized in an accident at the petroleum plant. A dead girl tied up under the sink.

Ghosts come back because they want something, or because living people want something from them: murder victims looking for revenge, or accident victims pulled back by someone's guilty conscience. Will can't tell if his life has been a long slow slide downhill because he didn't want anything enough, or he didn't get to keep the one thing he wanted.

He sees AJ reflected in mirrors and windows and CD cases, and regrets that he never loved a woman enough to kill her.

Will sees ghost roads as well as the ghosts of people, pathways into the black and white world of the dead. He walked down one once, and almost didn't make it back. PERFECT CIRCLE is a ghost road into territory that most books don't explore at all, or at least not from the angle that Sean takes. It's scary, though not because of the ghosts; disturbing on all sorts of different levels; and written like a song, with images and phrases which recur as refrains, changing with the context and gathering emotional weight as they go. The colors of the living world shine bright against the monochrome of death.

And I see that he finally got to use Neal Stephenson's "Stephen King meets Ibsen" blurb. It's still appropriate. Especially when you recall that Stephen King is often quite funny. But that's not what you remember about his books when you put them down.

Ordering information and extracts at are at http://www.seanstewart.org/novels/perfectcircle/

The author's notes for the individual books at http://www.seanstewart.org/ are well worth reading. Especially the one for GALVESTON.