"my name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. my hallucinations, however, are all quite mad."

I wasn't aware Brandon Sanderson had short works published, so I'd never given him a second chance. his first was Mistborn, which reads too much like YA, and not a fun one. basically the only thing I liked was the magic system. one could argue he might have gotten better since orphan former homeless Vin and her tendency to fall in love with the enemy in a matter of days. however, as far as I knew, the man refused to write at least one short novel, so I refused to read another book written by him. until I came across his novellas. 

I'm big fan of short books. with a lower number of pages, writers don't have much time to make mistakes and are less likely to fall into old habits, meaning they're forced to adapt their usual methods or change them completely if they want to create a well fleshed-out story in half the amount of pages they're used to or even less. and to know if they failed, one doesn't waste days of their life, just a few hours. for authors, that can come either as a challenge or a relief.

now, I'm not familiar with Sanderson's novels to properly compare this novella to them —all I know is that he usually writes epic fantasy, which is not the case here— but it doesn't look like he truly challenged himself with Legion. I guess it was more of "a welcome break from other projects", as stated in the preface of the edition with the three volumes (the novella is part of a trilogy). its title and cover for some reason made me think of X-Men, but this is actually a detective story (not me picking up another mystery book after the disaster of the last one), so my reading experience was as exciting as I was expecting: not much.

Legion is the nickname of Stephen Leeds, a man who I couldn't tell how old was and "whose unique mental condition allows him to generate a multitude of personae: hallucinatory entities with a wide variety of personal characteristics and a vast array of highly specialized skills". the mystery Stephen and his so called aspects are drawn into surrounds a camera that can take pictures of the past. the device brings back into Stephen's life, in the form of a black and white photo, the woman (apparently a love interest) who disappeared a decade ago after helping him gaining control over his mind and never contacted him again. to follow her trail, Stephen and four out of dozens of aspects have to search the missing inventor of the camera, a christian who seeks proof to his faith.

what follows is a sequence of quick conclusions and convenient solutions. the author simplified the interesting parts and complicated the boring ones without properly explaining eitheir of them. one character has a theory that Stephen's hallucinations are a way for him to cope with his brilliance and pass as someone unremarkable, since he doesn't want to be casted out as special (which happens anyway); to confirm it, however, the reader would have to continue the trilogy. Stephen doesn't consider himself insane, for his aspects don't stop him from function nor present a danger to society, a concept I highly appreciate. on the other hand, the fact that he can simply guard them in rooms of a mansion as if they were real people, without being really disturbed by outside forces, makes his condition too simple and easy. even more unbelievable is his ability to summon an aspect with the requisite knowledge and experience after just flipping through the pages of a book whenever a specific set of expertise is needed. is it an unexplored side of the human psyche or just magic?

the sci-fi bit also makes the plot unconvincing, since the mechanims of the camera are kept a mystery —a silly one to be frank— till its rushed resolution. again, more like magic than science. I'd prefer if the plot were a traditional mystery so the hallucinations could stand out more. they're easily dicernible and their interactions are funny, albeit their creator could've been explored beyond his role as their spokesman. here the number of pages begins to show insuffiency, but reading the first chapter of the second volume I could see myself becoming fond of the group at least a little.

to sum it up, Legion is an unmoving story with an unusual take on the found family trope and a bland protagonist. it feels unfinished, not well thought out, but it's easy to jump onto the next installment if you have it at hand. ultimately, its biggest mistake consists of a racist remark a hallucination blurts in the group's flight to Israel (yeah, of all places) and that no one —not the mc, not the victim, not even the other aspect who is always screaming "language!" after every mild comment— calls out. that made me side-eye even more the religious debate (along with the mc's expectation of "islamic terrorists") that seemed to be the "personal" bit of the story Sanderson confess in the preface.