Justin Steele at The Arkham Digest delivered this short review of Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine among his July Review Roundup.

I recently received an ARC of this from Tachyon Publications, who has been putting out many great books. Gregory first came to my attention years ago with Pandemonium, an imaginative book about possession (by beings more akin to Jungian archetypes than demons of Christian mythology). Pandemonium was followed by a few other highly praised novels such as The Devil’s Alphabet and more recently Raising Stony Mayhall. We Are Completely Fine is a short novel, and one in which I can see echoes of Pandemonium. The story follows a support group of “sole survivors” put together by a therapist. Harrison was a boyhood “Van Helsing” who later inspired a young adult fiction series, Stan was the lone survivor of a backwoods family of cannibals, Barbara has messages carved onto her bones, Greta comes from a matriarchal cult, and Martin’s augmented reality-game sunglasses allow him to start seeing the “hidden world” underlying reality. The novel is fast paced, and quite entertaining, as the dysfunctional group tries to come to terms with their individual problems while their paths are quickly drawing together. It’s entertaining, but I don’t think it’s his best work. It’s short, and rather lighthearted, and I can’t help but feel that it could have been a bit longer and fleshed out. Readers who enjoyed his other novels will find it rather enjoyable, and I look forward to seeing what’s next from Gregory.

Read the rest of Steele’s Roundup at The Arkham Digest.

For information on We Are All Completely Fine, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story.