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The Book of End Times is the John Clute essay collection that gathers his critical work from the late 90s and early 2000s, when the millennial moment was producing a particular set of anxieties and ambitions in genre fiction and Clute was one of the few critics with the historical depth and the analytical vocabulary to track them. The essays cover writers and books across SF, fantasy, and horror, with Clute's usual high-density prose and characteristic willingness to make explicit aesthetic judgments.
Clute's critical method is the demanding interpretive close reading he developed across decades of encyclopedia work. The essays are dense. The arguments are often more interesting than the books they are discussing. Several of the essays have become standard references in genre criticism.
Four stars. Recommended only to readers seriously interested in genre criticism. Not casual reading; a working essay collection by one of the form's most rigorous critics.
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