A book that really drew me in until the very end, when I was left staring at my ipad while mouthing WTF, but not in a good way. I've searched the internet for any explanation that would be either emotionally or narratively satisfying. I have found none.

Just amazing. Hall is an artist, and a mastermind, and this book shows us that Raw Shark Texts wasn't a one-time thing. He really is a great author.

I chose this book because of, first, the cover is so eye catching, I felt like I needed to read it now! It was hypnotising! Second, the description was so well written and honestly, it seemed quite interesting.
So, imagine my surprise when, I started reading it, right away, and I couldn’t connect with the story or the characters, even though it showed a promising start.
I’m not sure if it was in a specific moment in my life that made me feel this way or if I can’t connect at all. Ill give it a second try in the future to test this theory.
I hope you do connect with it and enjoy it!
I received an arc copy of this book from net Galley. Thank you NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own after finishing this book.

Steven Hall is an absolute genius, a master of any form his slippery, emotional, lyrical prose choses to take. It's impossible to not daydream about another book from him.

So, What Does Genesis Have to Say About Entropy

or, "Why an ox and an angel in Bethlehem?"


Part way into this book I started to have the nagging suspicion that I'd read this book before. Well, not this book but this sort of book, with the same sort of narrator, the same writing style, the same flavor of "ironic mysticism", and real science, existential dread, mind benders, and a multi-layered mystery/suspense plot. So I looked around and realized that this book was written by Steven Hall, the author of 2008's "The Raw Shark Texts", which I firmly believe is one of the best, strangest, and most thrilling science, suspense, weird, thought provoking, action novels of the past few decades.


All of the major characters in the book are writers, and Hall, through monologues from various characters, repeatedly makes the point that an author has to devote vast amounts of time to creating incidents in a book that might only involve a few moments in book time. That brief bit of witty repartee might have taken the author a week to get just right. Given that, I guess it makes sense that this second book by Hall, (which is in one sense all about the difficult challenge of writing a second book), took 14 years to see light. But it was worth the wait, presumably for him and certainly for the reader


This time around we have entropy and James Clerk Maxwell's demon. We take a long walk through Biblical Apocrypha, and lose ourselves in all of the ways that words can be made flesh. We scare everyone with a variation on Arthur C. Clarke's main idea from "The Nine Billion Names of God", mix in Yeats and the centre that cannot hold, shatter the wall between fiction and reality, and learn how e-books will bring about the Apocalypse. And that's the least weird stuff. Because then it all gets really strange.


This book is a bit more of a head trip than was "The Raw Shark Texts", which was trippy but actually held together pretty well. This book is on speed, and sometimes hits the guardrails and doesn't take the corners. It's not William S. Burroughs weird, it's more like it's totally coherent from paragraph to paragraph, but when you step back from it the parts don't all fit together. When you keep wondering about who, exactly, is writing this book, and who, exactly, is having a psychotic break, well it doesn't get better than that.


It helps that Hall can write. Even if you're not sure where he's going, the individual words, that become lines, that become paragraphs, that turn into chapters, are so tight, intense, witty, and compelling that you just keep on going, even as confusion begins to close in. And every now and then Hall pretends to clarify what's going on, usually just before the floor falls away from under you.


So, I loved this stuff. And I want a t-shirt that says "Why an ox and an angel in Bethlehem?".


(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

It's an odd book. It started in an interesting way, but it wasn't great. The plot was somehow difficult to follow.

I have feelings that are currently all over the place, and I'm not sure whether they're more positive or negative. Maxwell's Demon is an experience, I'll give it that: be it for the narrator's writerly wisdom and pretension, the twists and turns and circling back, this book was one of the more thought-provoking titles I've picked up in a while. The first third absolutely fascinated me, while the middle made me question whether I wanted to finish reading, but the final third got me back on track and then completely threw me off in a good(?) way. I question this because I have no idea what exactly happened at the very end, although the climax was engaging.

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I've put off writing this review for about a week but it doesn't seem to have helped; I have absolutely no idea what this book is about. I can appreciate what Hall was trying to do here but it just didn't work for me. I love a good mind-bending twist but either there were too many here or the resolution wasn't enough to make sense of them. all in all, i didn't enjoy this one, at all.

Very much in the take-it-or-leave-it style of House of Leaves (pun not intended) and other weird-format, surreal, experimental novels. Not my exact cup of tea but for those who like that sort of thing - such as fans of the author’s first book, from what I can tell - there’s no reason they wouldn’t also like this. Most of the references felt like typical obscure Wikipedia fare but I’m a nerd like that; that aspect (especially some of the Biblical history) could be a really engaging factor if any of it were new to a reader. Can’t tell whether the ebook was supposed to be really difficult to read because of the narrative plot of how one of the characters claims that ebooks are bad, or whether the publisher just can’t digitally lay out weird formatting in an accessible way yet.

Quirky and offbeat, this won't appeal to everyone, but it's a solid secondary purchase for most general collections.

It's a weird book, I stopped and started reading it more than once because I was fascinated by the weirdness and loved the style of writing.
It starts like a sort of "this is my life book" and then it mixes a lot of different things, from Bible to physic.
I think you can love or hate it, at the end I loved it.
It's a sort of lysergic travel and I loved but you must be ready for a trip.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I was excited to see a new book by Steven Hall, and I was glad it was mind-bending like the Raw Shark Texts.

I enjoyed the entropy theme and the story-within-a-story-within-... It is highly recommended for fans of Raw Shark Texts and other similar ergodic works.

I'm left a little unsatisfied with the denouement, but then here I am creating something out of nothing with my words.

The LORD said, let there be a GoodReads review, and the book was reviewed.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press (if that really is where you work, Sophie Almonds...) for the ARC.

Perhaps more important than the mystery at the heart of “Maxwell's Demon” is the skillfully crafted feeling of perplexity. It was engaging and bizarre, with brilliantly shifting points of view, and a seemingly unraveling mind of our protagonist, Thomas Quinn.
The novel builds from a slightly sluggish beginning, with more narratively opaque sections, towards a gripping climax. Not a casual read, but rewarding for those who enjoy novels that plays more like an existential puzzle than a traditional narrative.

"Mister B. Gone" meets "House of Leaves". This was a great read. Every time I thought I was going to lose interest, it dragged me back in with a new twist or hook. The ending went a little over my head (I'm not nearly smart enough for these meta-books), but I still enjoyed everything that happened, and how the narrative unfolded.

Even though I tried to read this, I couldn't, the start was interesting but then with every time we got to something that felt good, it wasn't, I didn't like it at all

Thomas Quinn is a writer who has not achieved the acclaim of his dead father Stanley or the huge success of his father’s protégé, Andrew Black. Andrew stopped writing and shrank from the publisher eye after a contractual dispute with his publisher. Now, 7 years after Stanley’s death, Andrew sends Thomas an enigmatic letter that lures him into a mystery that becomes increasingly surreal.

I wish that I could tell you what happens in this book, but by the end I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I did really enjoy the journey though. It’s a trip through various scientific experiments, the work of Joseph Campbell, bee dances, the value of the written word and the lost Gospels. The writing was excellent and the plot certainly held my interest, even when I was totally lost. I think it helped that I listened to the audiobook narrated by Piers Hampton. He has a wonderful voice and did a great job with the characters, atmosphere and pacing. I suggest giving this book a try if you are interested in having a different reading experience and don’t mind if your brain explodes a little.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Saw some other mixed reviews on this but I really enjoyed it. It was fresh and engrossing. Maybe the subtle twists and turns didn’t work out for some folks. Sure there were plot holes, but they weren’t too bad.

Very unsettling read at times. Not too sure about the ending but I’ll keep ruminating on it.

DNF @50ish%

This started off intriguing, but then just got...weird. 🤷🏻‍♀️ It wasn't holding my interest, so I am throwing in the towel. Can't love them all, right?

**ARC Via NetGalley**

3.5 stars
I have no idea how to explain this book, and I’m not sure that I totally got it, but I did like it. What I thought was going to be a story about the son of an iconic author trying to figure some stuff out turned out to be something far more complex and interesting than that. I’ll probably read it again sometime, just to see if I can understand it better.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc.

I've put off writing this review for about a week but it doesn't seem to have helped; I have absolutely no idea what this book is about. I can appreciate what Hall was trying to do here but it just didn't work for me. I love a good mind-bending twist but either there were too many here or the resolution wasn't enough to make sense of them.

None of the characters were likeable and I didn't believe a lot of the motivations behind their actions, even before the Lemony Snicket-esque costumes and alter ego reveals. The setting felt confused between contemporary and futuristic and I had to suspend disbelief a lot to follow the plot. I have no problem with abstract writing and there were parts of this book I found enjoyable, but I felt confused and let down in the end. There was potential with the order vs chaos theme, it just missed the mark and probably could have used a little less chaos.