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The book is set in Istanbul, Turkey. It makes a big deal out of this. Despite being set in the future, the history of Istanbul and of each of the protagonists is gone over in every chapter, in intersecting parts.

As a literary device, it helps ground the section in the worldview and mentality of the speaker -- as a plot device, it drags the plot down every other page, to the point where I would forget who was a current character and who showed up in the past as history. Imagine if you were watching a TV show where every time you changed a scene, you'd be treated to a five minute flashback. One of the protagonists, Cam, is 9 years old, and I would breathe a sigh of relief every time he started narrating simply because he was the only character completely grounded in the here and now.

I think it does this because the plot itself has very little to do with the history of Turkey. It's a story about nanotech and the future and investment banking and an economist who has a crush, and a boy who likes playing detective. And a couple of antiquarian MacGuffins that give an excuse to dig more deeply into the history of the city.

Is the plot good enough to make up for the reminiscences dragged behind it like a shaggy dog's tail? No, not really. It's serviceable, but it's a framework for the book rather than the meat of it. That's a shame, but it's clearly how the book was conceived.

If you like Martin Amis or Philip Roth, you'll probably like this book -- if you like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, you'll want to attack this book with a red marker or simply chop out a third of the book with a razor blade. It's up to you.

This book is creepy. It's a story about magic being used for war, and so in that sense it shares something with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but during World War II, and against the Nazis. And instead of negotiating terms with the intuitive Earth and with the wacky crazy Fairies, negotiation is done in terms of blood with beings that are all the more disturbing by being entirely sane and rational goal-seeking entities.

On the English side, there's Will and Marsh. On the German side, there's Klaus and Gretel. The Engishmen are clearly the good guys and the Germans are the monsters... or so it seems at the beginning, until it becomes apparent that all of them will kill for their own reasons. Klaus in particular is sympathetic to people that he really shouldn't be, while Gretel's odd precog behavior may be an indication that she is mad and enjoys death and destruction, or that she is trying to save her friends from an unseen cloud of world-ending futures.

The book does not have any kind of a conclusion, and so is clearly planned as a sequence of two. There are hints about plot points in the next two books, notably the reason for the Eidolon's hatred of humanity being because of humanity's own "violition" being exercised through the batteries. There are elements of the Anubis Gates in the story, through the workings of fate to the odd primacy of Marsh's character, but this is a bleak tale that talks about the entirely mechanistic and reasonable way that the unthinkable becomes commonplace to a war machine, even at the cost of sanity itself.

It's a bit about writing. It's also a bit about King's childhood, how he first started writing, his drugs and alcohol problem (how I could I have missed that the Tommyknockers was about cocaine???) and about how many of the rules of writing are more like suggestions when you get down to it.

King is not gentle about his own prose style and admits he's written some stinkers and has been pretentious when trying to write to an outline... but that's why the book works. There's not a single page that you want to skip over, because everything he says is relatable and human.

There's also a horrifying story about his car accident in 1999, all the more so because King isn't telling it to scare us. It's plain and simple, moment after moment recollection. Hearing about the details makes it clear that he's lucky to be alive.

EDIT: Anyone notice that the reviews that give low ratings to this book or say that there's "nothing new" in the book also tend to have glaring grammatical errors and "bloated" paragraphs? Or complaints about it "not being a book about writing." Here's a hint: King does storytelling. That's how he works, that's what he does. He's never going to be Strunk and White; his C.V. is essentially him showing his methods by example. See what he does, and then do the same.

Don't like it? Think it's "genre fiction?" Never read any King before because it was too common? **** you. I have no time for you. You're like someone who orders a pepperoni pizza and then complains it came in a cardboard box and has melted cheese and meat slices on top. May you write books about frustrated grad students who dream of sleeping with frustrated housewifes of frustrated college professors.

...I am so goddamn tired of stew. And bandits. And mouthy students. And thinly disguised shaolin monks. And beautiful girls who serve mead at a tavern. And stew.

And a "pixie" speaking in rhyming couplets. RHYMING COUPLETS. I felt like I was reading a 70's DC comic.

And the sexy pixie sex maiden of sexville was a damn sight easier to stomach than seeing Kvothe turn into the Goddamn Batman when he runs across the (stew eating) bandits pretending to be part of his tribe. And of course he takes the two girls back, and the town thinks he's a hero, and he breaks some poor idiot's arm who calls the girl bad things and everyone LOVES him for doing that and the mayor gives him money afterwards because Kvothe is just the Awesomest.

And then he gets back to University and all his tales of wonder and legend come back to him and everyone at University thinks he's even more awesome than before and girls flock to him like he just doused himself in Axe Body Spray.

ARGH.

I am frankly amazed that Kvothe hasn't killed, maimed or simply lost someone he cares about yet through his actions. It should have happened by now. It's a little incredible that it hasn't. For all of Kvothe's power and wit, he's incredibly careless, and it's implied in the final pages of the book that he has no clue who Denna's patron is, even though it's screamingly obvious and appallingly clear what sort of consequences his actions provoke.

Anyways. It's an easy book to read, the language is simple and clear, and it's funny. Just please. Please. Make this man suffer more, I beg you. He needs it so very badly, and so do I.

The nice thing about this book is that there's very little fancy language. There's no strange names for things. The protagonist is a child prodigy, but this is set up from the very beginning, and it's made expressly clear that cleverness by itself is a double-edged sword that leads to overconfidence and arrogance. The fact that it keeps working for him makes me want to smack him, but as this sentiment is clearly reflected in the book itself, it makes it okay.

Speaking of which. You could call Kvothe a Mary Sue, but that's not quite right. He's not an Everyman, and he certainly has a personality of his own. It's more apropos to say he's what happens when you drop Richard Feynman into a medieval kingdom -- you spend half your time listening to a folky story about a car breaking down, and then two chapters in, you're floating down the river on a raft using a motor cobbled together out of the car's engine and a converter using the solar panels in his pocket calculator and some fresnel lenses he scraped out of the windshield and WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING.

Ahem.

So that's one thing. The other thing is that this book is a tease. A total, no-kidding tease. It will spend three pages telling you about the agony to come, and the hidden wonders of the ages. When you get to the story in question, you realize it's a wonder from his perspective, and a horror of embarrassment and awkwardness. This works especially well with the problems that Kvothe can't outsmart, such as women and his own feelings about them. Kvothe's agony over "the girl" is both painful and obvious to behold -- everyone tells him that she's bad news, and he can't help but agree with them. Yet he's a sentimental idiot with enough brains to berate himself for it.

One thing that the book does absolutely right is not telegraph the awesomeness of Kvothe. He has to earn his stripes. No-one hands down a prophecy and it's clear that while Kvothe is a prodigy, the Arcanum has seen his like before and doesn't treat him like the center of existence. The lack of portentousness is more of a refreshing change that I expected.

Except... well, it's portentous in retrospect. It just is. It's called the Kingkiller Chronicles, forchrissake. It's being related back by the protagonist, who the World in the present time clearly thinks is Just Plain Awesome. There are all sorts of hints dropped of the "unlucky future." And the World related is very clearly "the shire" -- it's bog standard fantasy kingdom land. It's got some wrinkles (people are notably kinder and more generous to the downtrodden than they are in other novels) but you would never mistake this for China Mieville or one of the other master world builders.

Still. It's worth reading, just for the experience of reading someone who knows how to tell a story in a straightforward fashion.

The bit I like most? The totally blase reaction the media has to the deaths of several superheroes. It's not just that they're not surprised. No, they have a betting pool on which supervillains are going to do the most damage. It's entertainment for the media, and it's gruesome in a way that tells you how little superheroes are thought of once they're gone. Superheroes are in it for the ego, or for the pure exercise of power, or simply to get laid. The world praises them, flatters them, and then dumps them when they're done.

And then there's the Superdead. The accepters of gifts. They may not be damned exactly (although many of them took exactly that deal) but they're heroes who are still realizing what sort of gift they received. It's a cold world.

Empowered and her friends stand out in this crowd not because they're powerful, but because they still have the power to care about people who "don't matter" and each other. It's an odd lesson to learn in between the bondage and the burlesque, but this series has a way of surprising every time.