D.H. Schleicher's Reviews > Bang to Begin

Jethro Weyman’s Bang to Begin certainly begins with a bang. The opening episode is dark, disturbing, wickedly clever and sucked me in. Much of what follows had me thinking, “What the hell is going on?” I’m still not sure if this was a series of loosely related short stories or a really disjointed train-of-thought novel. Honestly it doesn’t matter. Weyman has a way about him, and I really enjoyed his “I never met a metaphor I didn’t like” style – some of them oddly poetic while others raucously over-the-top. In the more noirish episodes, his prose is staccato and suspenseful. The POV and time (and dimension?) hopping recalled Cloud Atlas while his taste for gratuitous violence and wordplay reminded me of Tarantino.

It doesn’t always jell though, and I almost gave up when the latter third of the opus derails into metaphysical nonsense with characters named Death, Time, the Twelve, and a “possessed” dachshund. At least Weyman gets points for creativity here. And then, bang, like the beginning, there is an epilogue that ties it all nicely into a bow and made me nod my head, thinking, “Yeah, ok, man, I get it…I think…wait…huh? Ok.”

This is not typically my type of thing, but, wow, if it is your type of thing, it’s probably one of the more audacious and entertaining examples of that thing.