Vajra Chandrasekera: The Saint of Bright Doors

The next Hugo-nominated book.

Fetter’s mother has raised him to kill his father. When he was a child, his mother removed his shadow, which somehow unhooked him from Earth and made him able to float at will. As an adult, he has abandoned his mother and lives alone in a strange city filled with different cults and religions.

There are so many different prophesies that there is a support group for “chosen ones” who were not chosen after all.  

 The outer doors of buildings in the city are usually kept open, as a closed door often changes to a “Bright door” which seems to lead somewhere else, as a cold wind comes through them but they cannot be opened. Fetter can see strange creatures, “devils” which roam on the streets that are unnoticed by the other people. The time period in which the story is set is strange; on the one hand, it seems to be set in medieval times, yet there are cars, TVs, and mobile phones. Fetter’s father is a cult leader who, on the surface, preaches for peace and nonviolence, but who actually might be very far from that; however, since his speeches are so powerful, people are drawn to them as if they were huge entertainment events and he has gained a lot of support. But has Fetter forgotten his destiny after all, will he really kill his father?

The world where this happens is very unusual and creative; unfortunately, much of it was left unexplained. Even the doors are left partly mysterious. Also, for most of the time, Fetter just drifts around and nothing happens - there were long passages or whole segments which consisted mostly of his visions of the “demons”. The writing was okay, but the fragmentary and sometimes pretty confusing, and the nature of the book, with the main character mostly drifting through events, wasn’t very captivating. At least, there was a nice twist at the end when we learn who the book's narrator really was. As a whole, it was a pretty uneven book, with some pretty good parts and some other parts that caused zoning out of the narrative – which felt almost nonexisting at times.   

356 pp.