I requested this one because it might be an upcoming title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one.

Once upon a time there was a rich boy who thought he owned a poor girl: this is the story of Gus and Catherine in the novel PROJECTIONS by S. E. Porter (Tor/Macmillan, February 13, 2024), Porter's first adult novel.

Gus obtains magical powers, which make his Dark Triad See https://www.britannica.com/science/dark-triad of personality traits even worse. Murdering Catherine for having a will of her own does not end Gus's obsession with finding Catherine's equal–whom he can subdue (and subsume) instead–or simply leave a trail of corpses when the girls say no. Gus can't get his hands dirty himself, so he creates versions of himself called "beamers" to look for a new Catherine.

Murder victim Catherine becomes an endlessly-screaming ghost hovering over Gus's head. She wants to save the female victims of his magical projections, stand-ins for himself. The pair, sorcerer and ghost, mostly hang out in the sorcerers-only world of Nautilus, while Catherine longs for the real world (the "unworld" in Nautilus parlance). She feels helpless, doomed to shriek and rage in a disembodied state forever. However, being a genius even in wraith form, Catherine may just find a means of revenge on Gus, one of these centuries.

This novel has sparks of real genius and originality but is quite a slog, asking a great deal from the reader with the perspective/world/time switches without so much as a chapter heading to indicate who/where/when. It took me ages to read the novel (it's just shy of 500 pages) and I almost gave up several times. I was 80% of the way through the ARC when the book finally got interesting.

Porter will write incredible doorstop-sized novels of speculative fiction; of that I am absolutely certain. She just isn't quite there yet.