Benny leaves the Braxiatel Collection in turmoil to excavate the site of the lost city Empire State – lost, that is, until it impossibly reappears!
Benny leaves the Braxiatel Collection in turmoil to excavate the site of the lost city Empire State – lost, that is, until it impossibly reappears!
I’ve listened to this story three times over four months… and really, really, really struggled to get this written.
The Empire State
A sense of elevator music pervades The Empire State. It’s got that strange, slightly weird, slightly ethereal ‘otherness’ to it, a strange and deliberate melody that gets inside your heard but then becomes instantly forgettable when it ends. It goes towards a fantastic series closer but suddenly, abruptly grinds to a halt just when you think it should be kicking off…
Eddie Robson doesn’t waste the story though. It’s full of ideas and characters who fully deserves their time. Bernice finds herself in a city that shouldn’t exist, desperately trying to piece together how she got here and why it’s here in the first place. We’ve been here before but to be credible I’ve never felt the ‘wrongness’ of a situation so keenly. Eddie Robson feeds explanations to us slowly, filtered through some phone calls to home, several trips to a friendly bar and, for Matsumoto and Rand some lovely shoe shopping. And when explanations do come they’re just as unlikely as the bizarre situation has called for.
But it all ends far to abruptly. As some people might have seen coming Irving Braxiatel is back but not in the most expected way. Instead we are fed hints and tips leading to him through the characters Maggie and Saf. And then, without spoiling the main story, Braxiatel appears and the story just stops…
There’s no denying that this story is a much more decisive series ender than Masquerade of Death. It’s not up to the giddying heights of the Crystal of Cantus, leaving us waiting to see exactly what will come next. Good stuff, but just one part of a much larger machine.
8 / 10