Assessment:
Overall rating (4 votes)
Recommended by Eli James, Jim Zoetewey, Sarah Suleski, Sonja Nitschke, and 2 other members.
No Man An Island
A complete novel.
Eight friends gather for a reunion vacation, but go missing after a hurricane strikes along their plane’s flight path. While friends and family mourn their loss when the crashed plane is found, the impossible happens: they appear in public claiming to have been in a cave in the mountains. Missing for months, they have no memory of the interval. What happened on that mountain, and the events that follow, will test their friendship, their faith, and the world.
No Man An Island
Boy meets girl. Fights demons. Faces the devil to save the world. Your basic love story.
— contains some graphic violence and harsh language —
Tags: angels apocalyptic children college complete novels demons ensemble experimental fantasy first person futuristic modern supernatural online novels past tense spiritual third person
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Editorial Reviews
"Epic" doesn’t even begin to cover it
This is a difficult story for me to formulate my thoughts on. Why?
No Man An Island boggles my mind. It’s such a complex story, a psychological fun house maze through time and reality. How can I describe it, how can I try to summarize it without tangling myself up trying to wrap a labyrinth of psychological and spiritual concepts into a pat little package? This is not a linear story, by any stretch of the imagination. It switches time, place, perspective, and subplots as the author sees fit, rather than based on strict chronology.
There’s a method to the madness, a solution to the puzzle, and half the fun is trying to figure it out.
And yet, for all this headiness, NMAI is an exciting, engaging, rollicking good Story as well. There’s adventure, humor, horror, angst, action, and romance. It’s a compelling tale of the lives of a large cast of characters, with Ethan Pitney at the center of the storm.
This is a very spiritual story. Christian mythos is a huge part of the entire story arch — it’s in many ways an apocalyptic parable drawing from Genesis, Revelations, and other books of the Bible. At times the morality of the story can seem very strict, with characters’ vices painted in the extreme and leading to clear damnation. I sometimes found this offputting, but it was very fitting for the allegorical nature of many of the characters’ roles. Nothing is superfluous or just there to beat a moral point, everything is a part of the puzzle of the story.
All in all, it’s one of the most memorable web serials I have read to date.
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A Novel of a Different Colour
G.S Williams is fond of describing No Man An Island as an experimental web novel.
In this day and age where the publishing houses want whatever works, running with something new and bold isn’t encouraged.
But, with the opportunities of the Internet and web novels, it doesn’t have to be like that anymore.
And Williams uses that opportunity with no apologies, and does it well.
Readers won’t find a novel like this on their local book store or in the libraries.
It starts simply enough: just a group of friends in an airplane. The plane crashes far from civilization and they are missing to the world, and, perhaps, even to themselves.
Lost, some of them afraid, the story ripples from this group of friends, becoming bigger than any of them could have ever imagined, until the entire world is at stake. Williams adds layer after layer, thread after thread, leaving the reader breathless and wanting more.
But above all, No Man an Island makes readers think. Perhaps you won’t agree with what is happening among angels and men, but it will make you re-evaluate your own beliefs.
With so many characters, Williams often switches point of views to continue the story. At times this was jarring for me, but overall the transitions were smooth, and added more dimensions to the story.
Because a web novel isn’t constrained by paper and binding, Williams was able to devote all the time he needed to the plot, and to the characters. No Man An Island is both an epic battle between good and evil, and a story about self discovery.
There are numerous references to the Bible, books, stories, and films in No Man an Island. Sometimes I found them distracting, but at the same time they serve their purpose well – rooting the characters into this century, our time, making them real and part of this world.
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