I wasn’t sure where this one was going to go.

I am a big fan of Shawn Inmon and his Middle Falls series. By a few chapters in, I felt this book was not going to be for me, but I kept going because I’m a completist and have only DNFed five or six books in five or six hundred. It’s not the author’s fault. It’s difficult to jump genres and tones and have the same reaction. Reader preferences can be erratic.

The early chapters of this book are the weakest. We meet Alex Hawk, divorced father of a four year old, who inexplicably on his daughter’s birthday realizes what no inspectional services or housing accessor has caught, that his basement is clearly too short based on the foundation and there’s a hidden area. He knocks down two brick walls, finds a mysterious doorway, a note explaining that the last guy who walked through, well armed, never returned again, and faced with the understanding that his daughter is counting on him to be her parent, he arms himself and steps through the doorway.

It was a bonehead move. Could he even breathe on the other side? Did it lead to a thousand foot drop? The last guy who went through never returned. Did the last guy’s father, who left the note, experiment to see what was there? No idea. Perhaps we’ll find out in a future book. But as a dad, I found it a terribly boneheaded decision from a father who spends the rest of the book lamenting how much he misses his child.

The early chapters introduce us to the world of Kragdon-ah, set in a hyper-distant future Oregon. The character’s names and the verbiage of the world are somewhat similar and difficult to grasp, so I went chapters constantly looking up who was who, scene to scene. Eventually, entering part two of the book, I started to grasp things and pull more enjoyment, but that initial base left me weary.

I got to the halfway point thinking I would not continue with the series, and now I certainly will. This is why I stick with books, especially from authors whose work I love.