Errata: "Jacob didn't think he'd never forget the cheers of the crowd that broke the calm." Double neg. "You keep your eyes away from it when stretch the tensioner." Should be 'when you stretch' or 'when stretching'. "...and he figured something with a name like catacomb had to be small." This is the place he’d already been told had trains running through it at one time! Small?!
This is another novel where the very title ought to have warned me off it, but I did not heed my better instincts! It was (purportedly - more anon) a steampunk novel about this guy who lives in a world where improbably large insects and other such critters threaten humans in a walled city. The size of the insects is ridiculous because not only would they be unable to support their own weight were they significantly larger than they were in pre-history (and these are really large), they would also suffocate, because air would not circulate through their breathing tubes.
The largest insect ever to have lived was something that looked like, but wasn't, a dragonfly, and that was almost 300 million years ago. It measured a little under 30 inches across in terms of wingspan, less than eighteen inches long, and weighed maybe a pound. The largest centipede-like creature was only 3 feet long. The inability of insects to breathe adequately at large sizes and to facilitate locomotion when growing so large, is what constrains their size. The author offered no explanation for the ridiculous size of these creatures - at least not in the portion I read. I was willing to let that slide if I got a good story in return, but it didn't happen.
The biggest problem though, was that this novel was all over the place and it moved at a glacial pace. The first 25% had passed before anything noteworthy happened, which was an attack from the insects trying to get in from outside the city and as soon as that was over, it was back to the doldrums, like these giant insects overrunning the city walls happens all the time and isn't any more of a problem than a mild annoyance despite all the deaths. You can quite safely skip that first quarter of this novel and not miss a thing. This is a problem with series. They're bloated with extraneous material.
It felt to me like the author hadn't thoroughly thought-through how traumatized people would have been by such an event as a giant insect attack. There would be all kinds of issues associated with such a sudden and deadly attack, but not a one of those issues got a mention here. It was like the author was dead-set on telling his character's story and he wasn't going to let the reality of his world intrude no matter what.
The guy in the novel is supposed to be an inventor, but never once did he talk about devising weapons to fight-off the insects. He was like, oh well, insect attack, scores injured and dead, but let me make this one artificial hand for this injured kid and then well forget about all of that and go explore the tunnels under the city. It was entirely unrealistic.
By magical coincidence, he and his exploring companion hear two people talking down in the tunnels and it proves to be some critical information, but it was such an improbable coincidence that it felt completely manufactured. Why would the bad guys even be down there in the first place when they could have met anywhere and had a private conversation? Predictably this dipshit klutz gave away that someone was listening, and it seemed obvious to me who was going to pay for his dumb mistake, so by then I'd had more than enough of this. I couldn't be bothered to read any farther, and I ditched it. This was one of those purported steampunk stories that isn't really steampunk. Instead, it has a mention of steam items here and there, but the main story has nothing really to do with that genre at all. I can't commend it based on what I read.
