Happy New Year!
I really liked the one other Tom Holt book I’ve read, The Portable Door. Unfortunately, I didn’t like this one so much. This is a good short story turned into a bad novel. The groundhog day
concept gets old fast. Loved it in the movie; hate it here. Valhalla is the afterlife where you go if you die in battle, there to battle to the death every day, wake up the next and start over again. An ideal place for Vikings or other military types who live for battle. In the novel though, a multinational, Kawaguchi, is making a deal with Odin to turn Valhalla into a tourist destination. See the afterlife you desire, then use Kawaguchi’s anti-thanaton device to return to life none the worse for wear.
Lin Kortright is the agent putting the deal together. Only he finds out that his daughter has just been prematurely killed and is in Valhalla (as a barmaid Valkyrie). Other characters we follow in Valhalla include Attila the Hun (who spends some time there watching paint dry, as well as being reincarnated in a pudgy fat kid), the Great Vincenzo (the greatest escape artist ever), and Howard (who fights to the death in modern warfare in Smethwick). All of these characters repeat their experiences over and over and over and over and over and over again. It gets tiring. And boring. And the payoff at the end is less than inspiring. The concept is all right. The idea of Valhalla is worth exploring, but this manner just doesn’t deliver.
And for the new year, my cataloging / search engine terms format is changing somewhat.
Author: Tom Holt
Title: Valhalla
Imprint/Publisher: Orbit
Publication date: 2000
Format: Trade paperback
Length: 277 p.
ISBN-10: 1-84149-042-3
Subject: Valhalla — Fiction
LC Classification: PR6058.O474 V3 2000
