Thanks to the author, the publisher and NetGalley for providing me this eARC in exchange for an honest review. I try to always tell the truth and in the course of reading this novel I almost gave up on it. The first 2 parts were excruciating slow to read but when the Huntress appeared on the scene and Felicity this story flew by and I really those 2 sections. So if you can hang in there, you will be rewarded with an awesome read. Highly recommended.

I tried several times to read this book. I expected to love it, but I just can't get into it. The pace is slow, which is not always bad, but in this case it is just not working for me.

This was a gorgeous book filled with Steampunk and classic brilliance that leaped off the page and let you breathless. I highly recommended this brilliant novel.

Someone, not me, will enjoy this book. It sounded interesting, but just could not follow it.... Might just be me. But it's not my kind of story.... Sorry, couldn't read it...skipped around...gave up.

I can't for the life of me remember where exactly I found this book. I know it was a NetGalley book that got lost to the annals of archives, and I had to go back through and track it down again so that I could read it and review it. (Not that I've done a great job of that lately, but hey, we're not talking about that...) This one had an interesting premise, that spoke to me as an author. The Lightning Stenography Device (or LSD as they so creatively acronymed it to) is a contraption you put on your head, and then the device takes your thoughts and pens them to the page. So literally you can write as fast as you can think.

Neat, right?

Mmmmm.

The trouble I had with this book is twofold: One, it was trying very very hard to be clever--and if you have to try that hard, you're failing; and two, it was about three books mushed into one. Not that it was long, but that it had three completely separate stories which only mingled with each other by virtue of the fact that they'd been bound together. (Metaphorically at least, for my e-book copy.) All three stories were interesting, if a bit confusing to follow...but I'm not sure how they're all supposed to fit together.

We begin with the creators of the Device, who realize that there are certain individuals who can use the Device while asleep, and have their unconscious create. Nifty! I'm okay with this so far. Stuff happens; spoilers, sweetie. Flash forward...an uncertain amount of time (it felt like it could be close to 100 years, but I know there's not a chance for that to be true) and now we're following Cassius, who is an author who has made some very questionable decisions in his life, both personally and professionally. We follow Cassius and his entourage, as he deals with whether or not he wants to have anything to do with this Device. Okay, fine. We meet one of the creators...maybe...and weirdness begins to pop up. Still fine.

Part three follows Cassius's girlfriend Katherine. Still present-day (inasmuch as we're in present day, I think it takes place in 2031 or so), still weird, still not certain about this whole Device thing. The stories told in sleep seem to be prophetic, and this of course sends everyone into a Ragnarok-esque disaster mode, doing all that they can to keep it all from coming about and in the process, doing exactly what they're meant to do in order for the event to come to pass. Katherine doesn't want to read her novel. Etc etc. I'm still...basically following.

The final part of the book is where it entirely loses me. Part four, as far as I'm concerned, is a story entirely on its own and has literally nothing to do with the rest until the final sentences. I had a few ideas as to what it was at first, and then decided it couldn't be that...and then maybe it was...? I'll be honest, the last part was probably my favorite piece of the book, once the story had evened out in part four, until just before the very end. I'd read a whole book of just that.

And then at the end, it just feels like they toss everything up in the air and try for a Big Reveal™ and fall flat on their face.

I never want to step away from a book and say "please just let me be done so that I don't have to read this anymore." That's not why I read. That's not the goal. The three rules I hold to any piece of entertainment are these: What was it trying to do? Did it accomplish it? Was it worth doing?

Here are my answers. 1) It was trying to be a Smart And Clever Book. 2) No. 3) ?!?!?!?!

I can't tell you if it was worth doing, because I don't truly know what the author was intending from it. I like the idea of it all. I think the author has a nice way of words, and can structure sentences well. They're a good writer--but for the purposes of whatever this story was, they're a bad storyteller. Piecemeal yes, they tell individual stories well. But you can't make a cohesive book out of short stories you decided needed to be together.

This book is very long. It started out great, but it is rather violent, which is not to my taste. I was confused by the premise in places, which is about a machine that takes notes on the dreamers dreams to create books. I am not sure how that premise made such a turn.

The language is very flowery and sort of old fashioned, which fit the time period it is set in. It may not appeal to today's readers, though.

quirky in its telling (but appropriate given its content) this work of speculative fiction is, of course, inventive, yet is more delightfully puzzling

DNF @ 50% This was a hard book to read. The beginning threw me off and I could not wrap my mind around the time the book was set, which I think was a big part of the issue.
The author uses extremely old fashioned, biblical names as well as formal language at the beginning between the initial characters. Then when she has them go into town, the reader realizes that they are in the modern world. For me, the lack of consistency was too jarring.

As the story unfolds, the idea behind the story is interesting and it kept me going. However, it is very wordy. For a while, I was reminded of the time of Dickens when authors were paid a penny a word and I thought maybe that was how the author of this story was paid. It was very wordy a when it did not need to be.

I wish I could have finished it but I could not. It is rare for me to put a book down and not to try and get through it, but I had to throw in the towel for this one.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me an advanced copy to read. All opinions are my own.

I just couldn't get into this book. The premise sounded so promising, but it really dragged on. I have no problem with a lot of detail when there's good storytelling involved, but this felt convoluted. There were definitely interesting philosophical meanderings, but there wasn't enough to keep me interested in what was happening with the characters.

Many thanks to M F Sullivan, Painted Blind, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review. Ok I was reading this book, minding my own business, not really agreeing with the author but I at least understood what he was talking about then BOOM!!!! It went off the deep end. Yeah, I seriously do not know what happened in section four. It was the most bizarre ending to the most obscure novel I have ever read in my entire life. After awhile I just skipped to the last few pages to prove what I thought was going on to satisfy my mind and quit it. The first section I really liked. It was eerie and foreboding and biblical. Really good. Just each section after that kept going downhill until it became schizophrenic. I did not enjoy this at all.

This book just couldn't grab my attention. It was dense and confusing from the beginning and I couldn't get into it.

The Lightning Stenography Device, by MF Sullivan, is one of the most self-indulgent and pretentious books I've had the pleasure of hate-reading in ages. I read it so you don't have to.

The device in question is a thought-to-text machine, saving you the trouble of writing things down, typing things out, losing all the brilliant tangents one travels down while crafting sentences, and working at the speed of thought itself. For some select individuals, the device seems to capture dreams, too. And those dreams are sometimes of the future.

Lightning Stenography Device. LSD. Get it?

<blockquote>"Cassius, no! Writing about writers is self-indulgent masturbation." Though behind her lurked the shut blinds of her office window and edge of a ficus she'd somehow kept alive since I'd last seen her in person three years before, she was not deterred from snatching up her bourbon. "Nobody wants to read that. Writers write for readers, not for other writers."</blockquote>
(Is there any other kind of masturbation?)

The first half of the book is all like this:

<blockquote>"No author did better than Pynchon in dancing around a depiction of that which cannot be depicted. There is a certain aspect of the unconscious which, by definition, cannot be brought fully into consciousness, and it is this from which the Word buffers us. It can, however, be experienced in one form or another, for better or for worse, and communicated with a series of symbols in context. That is what life is: a narrative we build to defend our egos based on a collection of more or less arbitrary vignettes selected to provide us with the context for our own being. When we feel ourselves becoming something we cannot or do not wish to justify, we are stricken by cognitive dissonance and find ourselves forced to face that which we never expected, never considered: that the existence our shadow is dependent entirely upon our own existence.

If we did not exist, now would our shadow; if our shadow did not exist, we would not, either."<//blockquote>
Got that? Note that all this intellectual masturbation is served up in the guise of dialogue, which makes it the most boring conversation I never want to be a part of.

Also, it's weirdly religious in places. Every writer is a god. And capital G God is the ultimate author.

The last section of the novel has a different tone entirely. A book within a book. Arguably it is the whole point of the novel, with its Jungian archetypes and high fantasy, but the pieces just don't fit together comfortably.

The narrative as a whole harps on the Matrix-like construction we live in, with the layer at the core being that Jungian dream subconscious.

One troubling aspect is how the female protagonists buy into the patriarchal clichés — the farm girl rescued by her prince, that sort of thing, and in the non-fantasy "realist" section, the central woman is somehow lesser, deferring to the older men.

The author provides some background on the publisher's website (although the book appears to be self-published), but even this verbose breakdown is quite patronizing. "One of the elements most infuriating to readers who were expecting a breezy read is, no doubt, both the elements of philosophy, and the structure of the book, itself." [That's two elements, by the way.] "I have received a few low reviews from readers who were disappointed to find that this was a book which required them to think." "I will avoid connecting all the dots for you." "The God the characters of The Lightning Stenography Device address is not so much the traditional godhead, but rather me, and I, in my role as author, play to them a kind of symbol of the far greater demiurge."

Of course, we are all the writers of our own narratives, the heroes of our own stories.

<blockquote>Even when you and I writer and rewrite a story, when we describe events happening to a character, a fictional character is experience it and making choices as that fictional character could only ever hope to make. We as writers experience through the character in our imaginations. The same is true of the reader, who, reading a story, experiences the simulation in their brain the way they would experience the real-life event. That's why you get so sucked into the story: empathy, pathos, between you and the character, that's the key, the binding. So if you want to imagine as a model that God was a writer, or even just a reader whose conscious experience of a work brought it to life, then it makes sense that you have to experience everything you're going through. It might not be a causal thing, necessarily, but if a model is accurate enough, you can make predictive extrapolations using the model, right? This manuscript is a model for our reality; its writer is a model for God. We're pawns in a thought experiment."</blockquote>

But I much prefer when the story takes the form of an actual, well, story. I'm not one to shy away from philosophy, but this book has the feel of little Jungian analysis that's spiraled out of control.

Too bad, because I would totally read a book about a thought-to-text machine.

This is an amazing book. It starts really slow for me but i kept reading it and i am glad i did. Story is really unique. Perfect mixture of sci fi and horror.

Sometimes you try something different and you're pleasantly surprised. Sometimes you try something different and then you can say you tried something different. Well, I tried something different. The blurb said things like "psychedelic" and "genre-bending". I guess so. The first section was about two brothers named Enoch and Hermes whose recursive discussions were philosophical debates about their relationship to a story that may have been written by God and featured them in the story we are reading. If that appeals to you, this is for you.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was such a joy to read. I love how it tied in real and fictitious events in to make the story seem believable.

Oh my goodness, what did I just read? I don't even know where to begin. Not only is this book a mash-up of everything I love, I had no idea at any moment where this story was going. Some people may not like that if you're a creature of comfort when it comes to structure, but this was such a ride. I highly recommend you add this to your May TBR!

The Lightning Stenography Device by M.F. Sullivan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a hard book to get through, unfortunately, but not for the normal reasons.

For one, I did kinda like the premise and have always wanted to see it done in ways more glorious than the way Stephen King did it, namely the automatic typewriter from Tommyknockers, pouring out a novel telepathically, but what LSD did, here, turned it into an existential/literary/religious/meta twisty-turny writer's wet dream.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a writer, too, and a part of me really gets off on the deep writer's angst bits, but most of the first half of the novel is devoted to it. I slipped from enjoying it intellectually and fell into "this is pretentious". I should have liked it more by natural inclination, but I didn't.

And then, apart from it being too long, I don't think anyone else would like it unless you're pretty much just like me and this author, enjoying the literary meta ride.

But then, the novel took on a very different turn and stuck close to actual storytelling. It turned into a fantasy with tons of great allusions and allegories and they were told with a strong voice both familiar and not *SO* usual that we are kept guessing. It was a pleasure to read.

Unfortunately, it wasn't the whole novel. If it had been *most* of the novel, I probably would rate this higher and clap. But it wasn't. Something just felt off.

Still, the whole novel was a very big LSD trip, even so, and I can appreciate the idea even if I didn't quite enjoy the ride. :)

Weird would be a good word to describe this book. But weird in a good way. I enjoyed the pace, the narrative and the plot. But it was a very strange experience. Recommended!

Thank you to NetGalley and M. F. Sullivan for allowing me to read and review The Lightning Stenography Device. While it was well written and quite popular, it just wasn't for me and I found myself slogging to get through it.

Genre - Fantasy/Metaphysical
Pages - 472
Publication Info - Painted Blind Publishing (March 19, 2018)
Format - Kindle
Stars - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“The Lightning Stenography Device” by M.F. Sullivan is a literary evolution. Told in four parts, with each part being a story unto itself and later inter-woven into the whole. The first three parts are pretty much near future fiction and stick to the same cast of characters and storyline. Part 4 deviates from the first 3 parts and takes you on a mind altering journey. Be prepared to think and get involved. This is not an easy read, but it is well worth every single minute I spent reading it. It’s complex, visionary and at times involved, but by books end you will have a better understanding of why the deviation or change in storyline was taken. I think the hardest part about reviewing this book is that it really does not fit into any specific genre, but bends many to the point of redefining them. If that’s hard to get your head around, well that’s kind of what this whole book tends to do. This was one of the most unusual and interesting books I’ve read in a very long time. I am looking forward to checking out more of M.F. Sullivan’s work.

M.F. Sullivan is a playwright and author of two novels.

From back cover: The first marketable thought to text device is released for public consumption in 2031. That same year, author Cassius Wagner will have a seizure. At least, that is what the novel says: the novel to which he awakens in fragments one morning after a late night of writing. This novel.

Terrified to have a prophetic manuscript unfurling at his heels, his desperation to evade his fate prevents him from considering that his lover and editrix, Katherine Beauvoir, might be wrestling with a destiny of her own--a destiny which seems to concern the discovery of a human skull, and the true identity of the device's mysterious creator.

Told in four psychedelic parts which peak with the fable of a sublingual Huntress as she fights to save her King, The Lightning Stenography Device blurs the speculative fiction and fantasy genres to explore the fabric of literature, the boundaries of reality, and the limits of human consciousness.