Before "Tori’s Row" was released I was lucky enough to read the first nine chapters.  Here I am sharing an updated version of my original review (short version: hie yourself thither to that website and start reading!).

How well do you know the world you live in?

Tori’s sense of safety is being dismantled brick by brick and every step she takes toward comfort is a step into further disarray.  Her life is becoming a nightmare and everywhere she turns, nobody believes her.  Hell, she doesn’t even believe her.  Within her surreal existence, the only companion who knows, shares, and truly understands what’s happening isn’t telling and won’t go away.  Welcome to Tori’s Row.

By dint of a fortuitous Twitter association I was invited by one Miss Tenacious Nancy Brauer of "Strange Little Band" to preview the first nine chapters this new title, co-written with MCM, author of "The Vector".  I enjoy both these authors so it wasn’t hard to make time for this enterprise.  In the past twelve hours I have read these teaser chapters four times.  So, what do I think?

I want to know what’s happening!  Each time I return to this story I’m searching out hints, clues, the tiniest little indicators of what I’ll see in the forthcoming chapters.  MCM and Nancy have got me hooked.  The Tori of Chapter One is emphatically not the same Tori of Chapter Nine.  Or maybe she is and I don’t want to admit it.  Who attacked her and why?  What doesn’t she know about herself, and does she really want to know?  I want to know.

The dreamlike narrative led me through the chapters feeling as anxious and as lost as the protagonist.  I say "dreamlike" because I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on what was happening, as if the very few tangible things in Tori’s consciousness were touchstones while everything else was indistinct and slippery.  That is amazingly like the actual feeling I have experienced after a shocking event when everything in the world faded to the background for a while.  It’s no mean feat to capture that experience in words.

Complicit in this story-fu are unsettling details that niggle at the back of my mind and make me wonder if I’ve misread them or whether the dark suspicions at the edges of my thoughts are what I think they are.  There is intrigue aplenty to be found in the opening chapters of "Tori’s Row" but I’m not sure it’s what I think it is.  Right now I know as much as Tori does about her situation and I’m quite looking forward to knowing what happens next.  I expect this story will become, in the immortal words of any grammatically incorrect small child, somehow even more gooder.

"Tori’s Row" became available Monday, 8 March with a new chapter appearing each subsequent Monday.  I’m sorry that it’s going to take any new readers 2 months to learn what I already know.  I recommend starting the first chapter right now so you don’t miss out on what is shaping up to be a fantastic story.

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