Magic is back, it comes back like a hurricane. No one is left unchanged, magic is not unaffected either. It’s the real world versus the Marci Gras. It will be a while before the world becomes adjusted to the new normal. ( )

This book certainly puts the reader through the wringer.
It's never an easy read on us, but boy, it's a very fascinating trip.

I probably should have started with the first two books in the trilogy but I'm just going through the World Fantasy Award winners and figured I would probably get into this book regardless. And I did. It's not hard to pick up on the fact that strange gods and a perpetual behind-the-veil Mardis Gras were happening on the streets of a post-devastation Galveston in Texas. Indeed, the magical world invading the world has happened several times with varying degrees of recovery.

I felt like I stepped into a rather more local American Gods written by an actual American. And without obvious cliches.

Were the revelers actually the trapped damned folks over different ages? How about the iconic gods?

Even so, the story mostly focuses on a couple of young characters who are put through some seriously messed-up paces, made to stand against the walls of Stewart's story, and they had to stare down into his barrels.

I didn't even LIKE these characters for a good portion of the story. And the whole fixation on poker? I get it! But then, I never really ENJOYED poker, either. And yet... Stewart's story came together and made me feel something pretty powerful. I both love and hate these characters and it's something solid, or solid-sludge, drifting across the pages and transforming in the middle of the storm.

I have to admit I grew to love this novel, but it took TIME to get to this point. What a ride! ( )

It took awhile to get going for me, and I found the poker metaphor heavy-handed (about half the references to playing your hand could have been edited out and I still would have felt like, ok, I get it), but I'm very glad I read it. It's the novel version of my beloved [b:A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster|6444492|A Paradise Built in Hell The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster|Rebecca Solnit|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347471802s/6444492.jpg|6634525], in which a post-apocalyptic world mostly sucks it up and imperfectly bands together to make the most functional community they can manage, in the way that people tend to do.

A 100-year-old ghost talks to one of the main characters, who is eaten by bitterness at all the civilization humanity had lost:

"'We didn't have penicillin when I was a girl either,' Miss Bettie said. 'Very few people ever have, Mr. Cane. You seem to find it so unfair.... Civilization isn't what happens in the absence of barbarity, Mr. Cane. It's what we struggle to build in the midst of it.'"

I'm not sure that's meant to be hopeful, but I found it so. ( )

This one is set in the same world-premise as Stewart's Resurrection Man and The Night Watch. Magic swept into the world like a hurricane in 2004 and humans in Galveston have been trying to ward it off for nearly a generation as the remnants of civilization crumble. The fantasy was darker than I've been in the mood for, but the narrative was extremely compelling - it wouldn't let me go. ( )

In 2004, waves of magic engulf the world and pull it into madness. In Galveston, Texas, two women hold back the flood of magic. With the help of the Mardi Gras Krewes and Momus, a trickster god, Jane and Odessa quarantine the magic into a never-ending carnival; anyone who demonstrates magic is killed or sent there. A generation later, Jane is dying and her only child, Sloane, bargains with Momus so she won't have to watch her mother die. But of course, there is a loophole--and Sloane is caught up in it.

This is an intense book. Classism and privilege are hugely important. Cut off from the outside world, Galveston is on the verge of slipping into the dark ages. I felt drained after I read this, and spent the next two or three days in a terrible mood. If it were less emotionally damaging, I would easily rate this as 4 stars--as it is, I'm still sick when I think of some scenes. ( )