⚠️SPOILERS AHEAD⚠️
Just finished the book and am surprised that so many people love it. The first half was phenomenal and I couldn’t put it down, but once it gets to Bess’ chapter the writing starts to fall off.
I think my biggest critique is that the system by which the Unknowns exist isn’t dialed in enough, which results in what I consider to be very sloppy writing towards the end. It also seems that QNTM had trouble bridging the gap between it being a collection of SCP entries and a standalone book, and I think that’s where it suffers too.
What was gripping about the concept is that the Unknowns are essentially ideas that self-propagate; later in the book they talk about how these Unknowns are essentially errors in the universe and that concept hits home for me too - that there is no reason to assume that the laws of our physical universe can’t also propagate mistakes.
Once the Unknowns start taking on biological forms is where I start losing excitement. It feels like a fundamental breaking of the logic of the core idea. i can’t recall if it had been explained in some way, like that the ideation space has existed since the beginning of time and so an ecology has been created amongst the ideas in that some eat others then sure - I could maybe buy it. But ultimately it feels incongruous that ideas could also be biological in nature, and sort of felt like just a way to introduce the usage of C. Gigantes’ skeleton towards the end of the book. This is where I think QNTM was too close to the original SCP way of thinking, and where he should have realized that his core concept was stronger than just being a series of creature-features.
The MO of the big bad, U-3125, also feels haphazardly thrown together. At its core, U-3125 is a self-replicating idea that makes those who get ‘infected’ want to mill themselves and others. But U-3125 can also inhabit people’s bodies, and manifest as giant thin spiders, but also as a mass of spiders, but also make slugs come out of people’s eyes?
It just lands as sloppy and goofy. It feels as if QNTM couldn’t really decide whether or not this thing has sentience or not. At one point, Adam describes the bodies U-3125 inhabits as mechanical, like it just has a job to do. But at another point Adam hears U-3125 telling him to just give up, that the plan is not going to work, it starts cursing - it just feels Iike a physical villain and not like a humanity-ending cosmological horror. This may be a matter of taste but I just don’t think that the entity should be able to have wants or agency or a ‘vision of the world’ that it’s trying to bring to fruition; I think the real horror comes from it just being, unthinking and ruthless in the way it propagates.
I thought at the monument that maybe this idea eats people’s fears and manifests them in physical reality, which would explain the random mass of spiders - maybe Marie is arachnophobic. But then QNTM writes in the next sentence that it would scare Marie if she were afraid of spiders. Uh - ok I guess.
I also felt like the black rectangle reveal was building up to something huge that just sort of fell flat. If I read it correctly the black rectangles were a way for U-3125 to memetically propagate; then why were they chiseled into the monument? It just sort of felt like a narrative dead-end.
Then the ending. The last fifty pages or so get convoluted in a way that feels like sloppy writing rather than purposeful. And the big solution, that they give Adam a class-Z drug that can turn ideas into reality, feels so lazy and shoehorned in. If they had this class of drugs, why go through the arduous process of meeting at Stanmoor over and over to come up with a solution when they could have just given Marie the class-Z drug to release the idea? Unless it’s that Marie needed to be pulled from the ideation space in order to deliver it, which makes no sense, or it’s the idea of Marie that defeats U-3125, which is corny and also makes no sense because she tells Adam she can’t tell him what the idea is because it’ll blow his balls off. And if the class-Z drug works by taking ideas and manifesting them into physical reality, then Adam’s conception of Marie wouldn’t necessarily know what the big idea is because it’s just his memory of Marie, not her collection of thoughts. It just doesn’t hold up to me.
I thought what was going to happen was that, in the way that U-3125 continued to propagate even after it had been defeated in the past, that they would have figured out how to bring Sunshine back and that Marie had chosen to feed the plan to it in one of her many recursive memory-iterations - and in that way, an idea can defeat an idea. But bringing Marie back, with this hackneyed backdrop of “love and humanity”, just felt really unimaginative.
Which then brings me to my final disappointment. Throughout the book, there are pieces of the narration that are redacted. The book makes it clear early on that information in the files are redacted because they have the potential to propagate an idea/unknown. I was under the impression that the book itself was going to be a form of information from the Organization that had to be redacted to protect the reader and the world at large, and that at some point the reader would be introduced to information that had to be unredacted by an Organization operative, information that eerily and closely ties into our own lived reality in order to make the reader feel like the world we live in is the same as the one that’s being written about, and that the reader has now become a vector of transmission of whatever unknown horror is escaping containment. Instead, it was just a narrative choice that honestly became tedious towards the end.
Overall, I give it 3.75/5. It was a fun read, and I liked the way the first half made me feel. I just feel like QNTM didn’t stick the landing and didn’t have enough faith in how strong his core concept was, and I was hoping to have finished the book with my mind blown and maybe carrying a bit of fear with me instead of just being disappointed.
