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Mostly Harmless is the Hitchhiker's book that fans argue about most, and I will not pretend that argument has a clean answer. The book is darker than anything else in the series. Arthur is older and tired. Fenchurch is gone. The ending, when it comes, is genuinely brutal.
There are excellent scenes in here. The Tricia McMillan parallel-universe material is some of the cleverest world-bending Adams ever wrote. The Grebulons watching Earth from Rupert are funny. The closing chapter is shocking in the way it intends to be.
The book also feels rushed in places, and the bleakness is not earned everywhere it shows up. Adams himself said years later that he wrote it during a difficult period and that he would have written the ending differently. Three stars. Read it for completeness. Then read So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish again to remember the series at its softer.
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