Behemoth: Seppuku, by Peter Watts. Wow. Quite an ending to the Rifters trilogy. As The half-novel prior to it was kind of an extension of the first novel, Starfish in its introspective and relatively quiet tone, Seppuku is more like the second novel, Maelstrom, with its more frenetic and extroverted path. I'm kind of torn, though, as much as I enjoyed the novel; the narrative was rife and rich with semantic nets that would be great to go back and parse with a much closer reading, but I can't help but feel the ending was a little...anticlimactic? But, that said, that's not taking the aforementioned symbolism into account, nor does that opinion accept that perhaps the ending mirrors a Herbert-style ending-that's-not-an-ending wherein it's almost encouraged to have loose-ends and almost start a whole new story.

Phew.

Anyway, a corollary: I just started the next Dark Tower novel, Song of Susannah, and realized something. As much as I like certain authors because I feel like reading their works changes my perception of myself and the world around me, and because I learn things from their narratives (McDonald, Herbert, Watts), I just realized something. And already said that, damn. Anyway, I was comparing in my head Ken Lubin (a Watts character) and Roland Deschain (if you don't know who he is, then you can just go right to hell), and wondering whether Lubin could perhaps be called a sort of dystopian gunslinger. I think in some ways he's comparable, but he really isn't one in the end, but that's besides the point.

The point! Is that it's funny when reading a dystopian post-bioapocalyptic novel with inherently dysfunctional characters that you're really into, you might'nt realize that it might kind of bring your mood down. I didn't notice that till while reading King's novel, I realized my mood was suddenly lifted, and I started to get a "Bring it, world!" feeling back, from my mostly broken-feeling week. Yes, there is something rich and changing that is kind of shared between those narratives - but I didn't realize that they could have such bright or shadowed aspect to them.