Books by author: Sean Stewart

I sought this out after reading a strong recommendation by Neal Stephenson. Galveston is an enjoyable and satisfying work of magic realism. I look forward to more from Stewart.

Will "Dead" Kennedy sees dead people, a simple McGuffin that forms the backbone of a beautiful novel. In his early thirties, Will is divorced, the father of an estranged 12-year-old daughter, and a willful slacker. Other than age and a passion for music, I don't have much in common with Will, but I felt intense compassion for him, and I was fully drawn into his story.

As in Galveston, Sean Stewart writes seemingly effortless prose, weaving magical elements into what is otherwise a character study. I chuckled at some clever turn of phrase on nearly every page, and I enjoyed the frequent but never annoying pop-culture references. There's nothing here that will change your life, but it's very well crafted, and I'll definitely be seeking out more of Stewart's novels.

Resurrection Man is about coming to terms with death, and it's a meditation on what it means to live. The anti-hero, Dante, is an "angel"; his brother Jet is a man without a soul. The setting is a world where angels and ghosts have just begun to proliferate in Western society, where rogue minotaurs terrorize the suburbs. It opens with Dante's discovery of his own corpse, and it follows his metaphorical descent into Hell. It's a bizarre premise, but it mostly works.

Sean Stewart has become a very good writer. His most recent novels, Galveston and especially Perfect Circle are excellent, and he was one of the chief creative architects of the A.I. web game (remember that?). Resurrection Man predates these by several years, and although it bears some signs of his later greatness, it isn't quite as good.

Stewart's fiction is a brand of magic realism; in his novels, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are part of the fabric of reality. In his more recent work, the ghosts are almost unremarkable — they create tension in the novel's universe but they usually play second fiddle to the protagonists. In Resurrection Man, Stewart hadn't quite perfected the balance of magic to realism, and the novel is a bit awkward because it focuses too much on the supernatural aspects of the characters. Seek this out only if you've become a fan of his later work.