Book Review: THE COMA, by Alex Garland

Oh, it just drives me nuts to read books that I wanted to write. Like this: I wanted to write the dream sequence, the short, illustrated novel about the man in the coma and his waking, and I'm so very irritated that Alex Garland beat me to it. But I'll have to relinquish that particular dream, because, not only did Garland write it first, he wrote a much better novel than I ever could. It's nice to know he lived up to the challenge.

THE COMA is a little work of art, simple, concise, imaginative--oh, I could go on with the adjectives forever--magnificent in its brevity, and the illustrations, by Nicholas Garland (brothers, possibly?), only add to the story's lurking tension, its stark, black & white beauty...

And Garland's only twenty-eight or something. That's really annoying.

RATING: 4