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I read this with #SFFBookClub, and probably wouldn't have done otherwise because IRL I find both election superfans and "too clever for elections" antis tiring, and their arguments tedious. I'm glad I was prompted to read it, because I enjoyed the majority of the book a lot, but in the end it felt sort of hollow.

The good: Older has the skill to make a thriller about an election actually... well... thrilling. I was very sucked in, at times finding it hard to put down. I think a key part of how is that she made me care about the characters much more than about the election itself. And the world itself is interesting - she ran with an idea that 20-30 years ago I would probably have considered a utopia, and has really chipped away at many ways in which it would not be. Plus the general background of different understandings of reality being what manifests social reality while also prone to being manipulated feels... prescient.

The bad: this book replicates a lot of aspects of Cyberpunk that I find a turn-off. The tone of the first couple of chapters almost made me give up, and there's this sort of simultaneous glamourisation of travel and flattening of difference that feels like a weird tic of the genre - even though this book at least modulates that a bit by travel still being clearly a hassle and a privilege. Ken's relationship with the various field offices didn't seem believable to me: how would he always know better than the locals, and why would any of them listen to him? And the last couple of chapters felt like a hurried wrap-up that just sort of forgot some of the potentially-interesting complications that were being introduced before them.

I found The Fall Of The House Of Usher intriguing but ultimately frustrating, and judging by the author's note at the end of this book, so did Ursula Vernon. Her reworking does a great job of keeping the atmosphere of the original while filling it out to be much more of a satisfying story, with clearer reasons behind what happens and much more compelling characters.

I love how the narrator has so much of their own story, and it's mostly made relevant to the core story of the book. And the mystery aspect is very well done, with that tantalising sense that we as readers are just slightly ahead of Easton & Denton in figuring out what's going on and what will have to happen. I also appreciated how Roderick gets to be more of an actor in this telling rather than a pure victim, and I'm intrigued by the ambiguity of whether Madeline also is one or whether we're purely hearing from the fungus towards the end of the book. It must be tempting when writing a story that fills in so many gaps from the original to fill in every gap, and I think stopping short of doing that was a very good move.