Pines / Blake Crouch

Pines by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

🎃🎃🎃🎃
What a ride! A weird cross of the X-Files and Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. Ethan Burke starts out with amnesia (shades of The Bourne Identity) among other injuries, and he finds himself in Wayward Pines, where things just don't make any sense. He's unsure why, but it seems that someone is trying to contain him, maybe make him believe that he's losing his mind. He starts meeting people, trying to make allies, but everyone is evasive. The weirdness just keeps getting weirder.

It reminded me of the Riverworld by Farmer, where random assemblages of dead people are resurrected by unknown agents on a new engineered planet and have to learn how to survive. Like Burke, Sir Richard Burton is unsatisfied with merely continued life; he needs reasons and he also goes in search of them.

Crouch keeps the questions coming, with all kinds of anomalies that defy explanation. He expertly manipulated my reasoning, making it all extra spooky and raising my anxiety levels regularly. I'm not usually a thriller aficionado, but I sure enjoyed this one. Well done, Mr. Crouch!




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