Brian Hawthorne

Hard-boiled cyberpunk detective story. Good fun!

Revisado: 11-06-14

Would you listen to Strictly Analog again? Why?

Although I just finished listening to Strictly Analog, I already know that this is one of those stories that I will listen to again. The combination of Levesque's superlative world-building, a genre-crossing storyline, great character building, and Cohen's stunning voice performance add up to an audio story that Is perfectly paced, has plenty of plot twists, and was a romp to listen to.

What did you like best about this story?

Although another reviewer referred to Cohen's delivery as "laconic," I would describe it rather as measured and deliberate. This is a story that asks to be read at a slow and sure pace, with plenty of time for the listener's visual imagination to create the scenes that Levesque paints for us. To my ear, Cohen hit the pace perfectly. Speed-reading a who-dunnit like this would be like turning to the last page to find out the ending before starting. Sure, some folks might do that, but I like to savor the mystery. The perfectly paced narration with tastefully nuanced accents and different vocal tones for the characters gave this the clarity of a full-cast production without the pomp and circumstance.

Which scene was your favorite?

My favorite stories and authors run the gamut from old school SF to cyberpunk to urban fantasy to potboiler detective yarns. Strictly Analog draws from all of these genres, and throws in a bit of the currently popular post-apocalypse for good measure. I will definitely be exploring more of Levesque's work.

Any additional comments?

I received a free review copy of this audio story from the narrator, in exchange for an honest review. A few minutes into the story, I knew that Cohen's performance of Levesque's story had hit that sweet spot for me: the perfect drive-time story that kept me sitting in the driveway when I got home, so I could listen to the end of the chapter, and made me look forward to getting in the car to drive to work in the morning.

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Rich, dark, and disturbing.

Revisado: 03-21-14

What did you like best about this story?

Nathaniel Hawthorne's prose is as dense as a Christmas pudding and just as intoxicating. In Rappaccini's Daughter, he presents as disturbing a love story as any I have read. If he were writing in today's genre-crazy market, this book would be shelved alongside H.P. Lovecraft and modern horror writers. As an audio story, this would fit well on the Pseudopod horror fiction podcast, albeit as a jumbo episode.

Be prepared for descriptiveness of a style not popular among 21st Century writers. Hawthorne's penchant for sensuous verbiage is nearly pornographic for the lover of words. If you like your fiction hard-boiled and your writing stark, you may not find Hawthorne to your taste.

Speaking of pornography, the treatment of gender relations in this book is solidly set set in an earlier century. Told from the viewpoint of a young Italian gentleman! the story is from start to finish an amazing example of the male gaze. Giovanni sees the entire world in relationship to himself, with the lovely Beatrice a main character with no actual personality of her own. In fact, that is the plot of the story. Beatrice's evil father, representing Science in its 19th Century guise, uses his daughter for his amoral researches and in the end loses her. We are left with the horrible realization that the religious good intentions that undo Beatrice are still with us today. While so much of Hawthorne's world seems distant in both time and space, the forces at play here continue to this day.

What does Steven Jay Cohen bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Cohen's voice brings life to the characters in this story. His accents and tonal changes seem spot on for the characters in the book, and by the end of the story, you will forget that you are listening to a single-voice narration. Although the narrator's voice is a bit breathy at the beginning, overall this was a very enjoyable reading of the work.

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