Warp

Not at all related to “The Magicians,” Lev Grossman’s newly re-published novella “Warp” does have similar characters and voices. Hollis (full name Hollister?) Kessler is a lot like Quentin, but again, they live in different worlds. I call it a novella because it is a bit short to be a full novel. And, that said, the book had promise – a lot more could have happened, if it had been longer, or even extended into a series. It was more like a very long short story or a string of very short short stories. There is also a sub-text, which I did not read very much into. I interpreted this as being Hollis’s thoughts: the things he thought but did not say. Perhaps he was an aspiring writer, and those were some of the things he would have committed to paper, or if not practice writing in his head, the rest are memorable lines from pop culture (if that also includes sci-fi). Why the book is called “Warp,” then, isn’t really explained.

The plot, if there was one, centered around a few guys who don’t have anything better to do than break into the house of someone they know, to find keys to break into another house owned by those same people, or just stay in the first house and eat their food and drink their booze and who knows what else. So, that made me a little uneasy, along with an unspoken tension, that maybe I just imagined, thinking the darkness of Fillory would creep into Boston.

It wasn’t always clear whose lines were whose, but like “The Magicians” there is a lot of sarcasm, summed up a few times within: “everyone’s a comedian.” The real hero of this story might be Hollis’s overcoat, which serves multiple purposes and sees him through the best of times and the worst of times. The real strength of “Warp” is the way Grossman wrote about light, and setting in general; especially as these are places I know, his words made the scene that much more vivid.