Literary Significance and Reception
Regina Schroeder in her review for Booklist said "Herter's blending of contemporary fantasy and Kent's Verne opera-in-progress is seamless and intense, and his creation of Downstairs fascinating but terrible. An exquisite, subtle performance." Charles De Lint reviewing for Fantasy & Science Fiction said "there is far more to praise in Evening's Empire than to criticize. It's true that I couldn't help but be a little disappointed that its early promise of wonder and character depth, sustained through most of the book, didn't resolve with a similar flair and innovation. Yet even if the end doesn't quite measure up to Herter's ambitions, at least he made the effort to break some new ground. And mostly he succeeded." Peter Cannon reviewing for Publishers Weekly said "while the novel's promotional copy compares it with Gene Wolfe's Peace and Charles de Lint's Newford stories, the cop-out ending is not one either of those pros would have chosen. But all the good writing that goes before suggests that Herter should gain the necessary mastery of his craft in due course."
Read more about this topic: Evening's Empire
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“I went to a literary gathering once.... The place was filled with people who looked as if they had been scraped up out of drains. The ladies ran to draped plush dresses—for Art; to wreaths of silken flowerets in the hair—for Femininity; and, somewhere between the two adornments, to chain-drive pince-nez—for Astigmatism. The gentlemen were small and somewhat in need of dusting.”
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“I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)