I've read a lot of books that I enjoyed, some of them a lot, and I've read a lot of books that I didn't enjoy, some of them a lot. However, often the ones that stay with me the longest are the ones that I didn't particularly like but nonetheless appreciated for what they did and what they achieved. That would include recent books like 'Everfair' and 'Too Like the Lightning' and old Hugo winners like 'Lord of Light' and 'The Snow Queen'. Early on in this one, I had a feeling that I'd be adding 'Hinterland' to that list, because I have to admit that I like what it does but I can't say that I enjoyed it that much.

What it does and does really well is culture shock. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to come up with another book that does culture shock this well; I'd probably have to go back to J. G. Ballard and Anthony Burgess. I understand culture shock because I'm English but I live in America and we really are two countries separated by a common language. Even after seventeen years here, I'm still constantly bumping into things that Americans take completely for granted but which make no sense to me because I just don't have the same cultural heritage. And that sort of culture shock is what most of this book is. And that's often confusing.

It's wild from the outset, because it wears its heart on its sleeve, full of wordplay and random slabs of facts, mostly in dialogue, often between a precocious teenage girl named Aurore Arana and Medea, her free spirit of a mother. It's all surreal, jagged, ever moving, often overwhelming and utterly ADHD. I can imagine most readers actually putting this down after the very first chapter to reevaluate whether they're going to continue or not. It's less traditional prose and more a cathartic braindump. And, while it does turn that down a little after that first chapter, it complicates things in other ways and continues to be confusing.

Aurore and her mother are staying at a bed and breakfast on the Arizona border with Mexico, when It happens. And It's a big It. Another couple of kids, Sophie Rose and Tyler Gack, eat some habaneros and manage to rip the fabric of space/time, with this Sophie and Tyler shifting into a parallel universe, while Aurora is watching, and the Sophie and Tyler of that parallel universe shifting over to ours. There are many similarities, whether we're talking about the universes or the kids, but there are big differences as well, major ones. For a start, there are giraffes in this alternate Arizona. And aurochs. And Crots, who are centaurs who split into two parts.

Differences like those shouldn't be particularly hard to follow and indeed they're not, even as they get bigger and far more obvious as the novel runs on. However, other differences are more of a problem, like the fact that these parallel universe kids speak a variant form of English that I'd call Franglais or Spanglish if it merely added words and phrases from one other language. However, their variant includes not only French and Spanish but German too. They're just as culturally confused by our universe as we are to what they expect from theirs, partly because customs, tech and living creatures vary considerably but also because some words simply have different meanings. Over there, they talk about plastique all the time, but they're not referencing plastic explosive, they're talking about blood or DNA or something I couldn't quite figure out. Because I'm from this side of that rip and they're not.

Had Chris Dietz only gone that far, I think this would have been reasonably simple to decipher, but he has other ideas. Lots of ideas. So, many of the other kids at the bed and breakfast, including Aurore, suddenly wake up to find that they have doubles, because their parallel universe equivalents are right there with them, something that confuses the heck out of their parents and the officials who start to arrive and fail to figure out anything. And, just to layer icing on the confusion cake, Aurore and her double, who decides to call herself Neo, pretend to be each other, just for kicks and for the intellectual challenge of deceiving everyone else. They're alike in so many ways.

So I like this. I like the ambition on display from a small press author to even attempt something like this. I like how far he took it too, confident in his ability to keep this fundamentally confusing story clear enough that we can follow it without throwing up our hands in despair. I like how Aurore is a highly precocious girl, overly fond of obscure facts and big words. I remember being Aurore and it was fantastic to see a character like that, especially one who's enough of a pixie to just play with the adults around her, especially during such a tough time. And I like that these adults are not the ones who save the day. They are confused from moment one and, while they think they figure some things out as time goes by, they really don't figure out anything. Solving this problem falls to the kids, on both sides of the rip.

But I can't say that I didn't struggle with this. Some of these ideas are fascinating but they make it difficult to follow what's going on. Combining that with the stream of consciousness wordplay can be dazzling. And then there are a few bizarre stylistic choices like never spelling out any numbers, even basic ones like two or three. And, of course, doing it all from the very outset makes this quite a challenge. Here's part of page three, to show you what I'm talking about:

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"Moods are ways of moving through the world. That's what you tell me. That's what you say all the time. As though you could choose."

"Youth is a world view, my frabjous tortilla chip. You try on all the outfits in all the sizes. And you're an artist too: that makes it worse. Better? My luminous one. Because you can get away with anything. What—am I being harsh? I can't do it—move between worlds the way you do. You know quarks, you know the first 3 minutes. I barely keep up. I have to be professional. Adult. Ha! Numinous one, are you there?" She smirked. "Corona of conflagration, you're an artist!"

"Words are toys. We're just playing. I haven't individuated enough to be objective," the girl murmured.

"Maybe you're feeling an excess of protons this morning? Maybe it's a bit of spoiled cyclotron? I'm kidding. Don't go away. Ma petite microchip. Where are you? Stay with me!"

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It isn't quite like that for the whole novel but it's not remotely unrepresentative. And that's the normal bit before the rip happens and characters are shifted or doubled and the languages diversify and the ideas follow suit. It's grounding before it gets truly wild.

So, really, while I liked a lot of what's in 'Hinterland' and I appreciated what Chris Dietz was trying to do, just read the paragraph above. If that makes you want to read the book, it's going to knock your socks off, but, if you can't imagine reading more than half a page of that sort of prose, this is absolutely not going to be for you. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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