Metaphorosis Reviews
Written on Jun 25, 2023
Summary
On holiday at an English-run chalet in the Swiss Alps, tourists and proprietors are cut off from the world by an avalanche, only to find that something is causing some of them to act very strangely.
Review
As Christopher himself puts it (as a character discussing an in-book story), this is “written bout fairly pleasant people in fairly pleasant prose.” And, frankly, that was a pleasant relief from the tedium of the L.E. Modesitt book I was reading at the same time. Christopher is a dependable, talented author, and he largely comes through here.
The science fiction element here is somewhat ancillary – this is really a book about people and how they respond to each other. Christopher shifts through several perspectives across the book – one per chapter – giving us a chance to get to know many of the key characters better. They’re all engaging, interesting, moderately complex, and fairly ordinary, though some are a touch oversimplified.
Christopher relies on a tried and true device – sudden isolation cuts a group off from civilization, there’s an external threat, and they start being picked off one by one. But, because the characters are so self-absorbed, it never really turns into a horror story. They also do a lot of drinking.
The story comes in two parts – one a setup of the alien beings of the title, and the second about the humans. The human story has a decent (if somewhat easy) conclusion. The alien portion is resolved by implication, but to my mind lost something by not completing the initial framing.
I said above that the characters are self-absorbed, and they are – we hear, in bits and pieces, tidbits about them, their desires, and their prior relationships. But that works fairly well for this story, though it also slows substantially in the middle, when we’ve gotten to know them, but little is really happening. They run close to the verge of whiny before the action saves them from themselves.