There's just enough here to make parts of this book interesting, but Card tries too hard to force dialogue and situations that simply don't work. Which is too bad, because for a few pages this book comes close to the type of chills one might find in Peter Straub's "Ghost Story" and "Shadowland."

When Card writes well, he writes very, very well. This is not an example of Card's best work. At times you cringe at the awkwardness of his prose. When witches enter into the picture, that's when it starts to slide downhill rapidly.

There's a reason why Stephen King rules this particular brand of fiction; he makes even the most impossible situations plausible. One gets the sense from much of Card's writing that he's trying to reshape the world in his image, and in doing so, often fails because he's too personally tied to the message.

One point that needs to be mentioned: the author makes no bones about his political leanings, and his Clinton-bashing gets a little wearying for those who simply want a good story.

Like all of Card's books I have read (around 10), this one is very well crafted. The character development is full, with a richness that only he brings to a novel. The story is well written and strong. It never plods along, but moves quickly, though it doesn't rush.

Read it in 2 days. Picked it up and just kept going. Not science fiction like Ender's Game and not as good of a novel as Ender's, but still Card's wonderful style. The characters are well rounded and the story takes you in until you can't stop.

The Good: The book moves along smartly. The story is interesting enough to keep you reading. It will no doubt make a smart movie script, if it hasn't already (I don't keep up as I should...)

The Bad:
The characters ring false. The entire story of Fears' rise to wealth feels contrived and unconvincing. I never felt that Card made an effort to get into the head of an unexpectedly rich computer geek; instead, it seemed that Card needed his character to be rich and gullible, and any set of circumstances that resulted in same would have done as well. One never sees how one development flows naturally from the combination of character and circumstance. When Mad and Tin embark on a program of cultivating politicians, we're simply told they embark on a program of cultivating politicians; we don't see the interaction, we're given no examples of how they exploit pet causes to enlist them, nothing at all to convince us that real people are influencing real people. We're presented with a plot sketch rather than a plot and asked to accept that Card has established Mad's bonafides as an ambitious and power-hungry manipulator.

This sets up a real problem with the book. When every development in the story feels forced and unnatural, then the sense of being manipulated and anticipated by Mad loses all impact. The party at which he met Mad was so unconvincing the first time around, that there is no head-slapping moment later in the book when it is revealed that it was a set-up. Card doesn't even bother naming the hostess, as important as she is to the story; she is the stereotypical grande dame, cleverly referred to in the book as 'the grande dame.' She isn't a person, she's a couple of lines of world-weary clever banter attached to a desultory description.

Which leads me to a problem I've encountered in Cards' books before: the Wunderkind. Without offering a spoiler, I can only say that the reader is presented with a character who is yet another preteen operating at the highest levels of adult sophistication, without prior development preparing the reader to accept it. Lapses into childish behavior that are clearly intended as jarring departures from sophistication fail, because the sophistication has been asserted rather than established.

All told, shallow character development and contrived plotting makes this feel more like a movie treatment than a novel to me. On the plus side, I'd go see the movie.

Orson Scott Card's science fiction has always been characterized by strong character internalization and wonderment over the unknown (essentially a mystery element, but not in the who-dunnit sense). These virtues translate well into his forays into the horror field. There is an unsettling disquiet as to what is coming next that creates an erie, spookiness (no hack and slash gorefests here) that surprised me. I also think that the internalizations, as well as key elements of the plot, itself (sorry, don't want to give anything away by being more specific) suggest that one of the scariest things is for others to truly know what we are thinking about ourselves and others. A nice change of pace and a compelling read. Donald J. Bingle, Author of Forced Conversion.