Dark Reading Matter by Jasper Fforde

My thanks to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the gift of an eARC of this book. The thoughts and opinions contained in this review are as unbiased as I can make them.

Okay, so, wow.

I’ve just spent the last month and a half reading through the previous seven volumes in the Thursday Next series in anticipation of reading this one, and when I say this is most definitely my favourite of the lot, I almost feel like I’m selling the book short. It’s been twelve years since book seven (The Woman Who Died a Lot) came out but the gap doesn’t show in the style and substance of Fforde’s writing.

I’m not going to lie, for maybe the first third of this one I was a little bit worried. To begin with it reads like really bad fan fiction, or like someone gave ChatGPT the prompt to write a new Thursday Next but badly, and I honestly wondered if he’d lost that spark. But then it all clicked in place and suddenly I couldn’t decide if Fforde was a certified genius, or just certifiably insane. Or maybe both.

If you thought the first seven books were a bit fourth-wall-breaking and surreal then you ain’t seen nothing yet. Without giving away any spoilers, this one has all the action and introspection you could ever want, and is so self-referential it’s damned near solipsistic. There’s even a bit of authorial self-insertion going on that would leave Micheal Moorcock a little in awe.

Is this a good end to the series? Hell yeah! Is it worth grabbing a copy and inhaling it as soon as it hits the shelves? Also hell yeah! A pretty much note-perfect way to end the series, and I definitely recommend it to all fans of Thursday Next.