Speculative Fiction Junkie

Zoran Živković

It's always exciting to discover a new author, especially when that author is from a part of the world whose fiction I've not had the pleasure of reading before. I've heard the work of Serbian writer Zoran Živković praised in several quarters and the excellent PS Publishing seems to have been publishing a lot of his work recently.

When I read that his work called The Last Book was both a thrilling mystery and a sort of celebration of books in general I was sold. It didn't hurt that Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose reportedly played some part in the book either.

The Last Book is told from the perspective of Inspector Dejan Lukić, who, as the book opens, has just arrived at the Papyrus Bookstore in the wake of the seemingly normal death of one of the store's patrons. Soon, however, another visitor dies. Then another.

Having completed the book, the best things I can say about it are that it is mildly interesting and mercifully short. In my opinion, the book fails in almost every way that a book can fail.

First and foremost, the story isn't that interesting or plausible. Mr. Živković's resolution of the mystery that unfolds in The Last Book was at best boring and at worst seemed so totally bizarre and insufficiently related to anything to be satisfying to any real degree. The book might as well have progressed by Lukić learning that the bookstore deaths were the result of the deceased having come into contact with poisonous goo unwittingly left on the books by two extraterrestrial patrons who liked to frequent the shop. In hindsight, it seems clear to me that one of the main reasons for this is that the author appears to be primarily concerned with preserving the ending twist to the book rather than with writing an interesting story. As a result, the book simply fails to capitalize on its promising premise.

To make matters worse, the book's settings are poorly described and the characters are some of the shallowest I've encountered in some time. Now, I know that sometimes it's completely appropriate to be vague about the places that are described in a book, but in this case, the book's other failings made it difficult to overlook the omission. The characters are either poorly described or, to the extent that they are fleshed out at all, just seem out of place and dorky, for lack of a better term.

I'm glad to put this one behind me and doubt I will read anything by Mr. Živković in the future.

Rating: 4/10

The True First

The Last Book was first published by PS Publishing in March of 2008. There were two editions: 300 jacketed hardcover copies signed by both the author and the writer of the introduction, John Grant; and 500 unjacketed hardcover copies signed by the author.

[This review was not based on a review copy]