Reviews for Oliver Bell and the Infinite Multiverse and Grantrepreneurs
From Steven Mayoff’s review of Oliver Bell and the Infinite Multiverse | River Street Writing
“This detailed and often dense melding of science fiction and demonology is liberally sprinkled with Swan’s trademark caustic social commentary. Comparisons to Douglas Adams may be inevitable, but add a dash of Tolkien and a pinch of Pynchon to this cosmological smorgasbord of a novel and you’ve got yourself one engagingly volatile page-turner.”
From Ian Colford’s review of Oliver Bell and the Infinite Multiverse | The Seaboard Review
“Oliver Bell and the Infinite Multiverse represents a triumph of the imagination. Jake Swan has written a novel that provides shocks, surprises and laughs on every page. The book is emphatically not for all readers, but anyone with a finely tuned sense of satire and an appreciation of the absurd will find plenty to enjoy.“
“It’s like living a happy nightmare,” he told me.
I’m not sure what he means.
Having finished, and loved, Grantrepreneurs, I know of what its narrator means: I’m not sure what “he” means, either, but it really was like a happy nightmare, this book! Or like a latter-day picaresque—like Candide, by Voltaire, say, but one in which the picaro doesn’t travel so much as have all the weirdness come to him in one place…more like the film Something Wild, then, in which we encounter a recognizable, but decidedly off-kilter “reality”, whose increasing absurdity (whose happy nightmare) is orchestrated by a deft prestidigitational hand, one whose aim is satirical, certainly, but also, for all that, still recognizable and fully human—our deracination, like narrator/erstwhile medicine man and budding grantrepreneur Nick (“the scatter-brained guy”), is a relentless but gentle one, as we come to truly “see” what we’ve suspected all along, but took the entire novel to truly embrace: that “we’re all weirdos,” of course.
See the rest of W.D. Clarke’s review of Grantrepreneurs | Goodreads
Jake Swan 