An Underworld I Wanted

A thriller with cosmic implications, a metaphysical awakening with real-world scaffolding, a love story with wild, speculative scope.Genre-bending, 'luminous,' hypnotic and compelling, Amie Martine’s story begins in THE LOOK OF AMIE MARTINE, the novel that launched a speculative fiction trilogy with must-read sequels, THE POWER and THE COSMOS. All three novels are collected in this special anniversary edition as an omnibus.At its heart, this is the experience of a woman who, seven years before the story begins, survived a kind of death in Iceland and emerged with an extraordinary ability she calls 'The LOOK.'She can sneak into people’s souls, read the blueprints of their inner lives, and shift what she finds there.Within twenty pages you realize you’ve stepped into something that isn’t going to leave you the way it found you.In the tradition of spiraling literature like Cloud Atlas, time-warping films like Inception and rebellious, fate-defying shows like Netflix’s The OA, Amie Martine’s story brazenly defies description. In the process of entertaining, the trilogy accomplishes something rare: it makes the extraordinary feel absolutely, mundanely real, and then uses that realness to knock the floor out from under you.Working with a cast of characters that includes A-list actors, filmmakers, assassins, historical warlords, Irish poets, Sufi masters, midwives, UN peacekeepers, mythic legends and real-world thugs all placed in the mind-bending context of spherical time and trespassing souls, the series manages to wrap a love story in the fabric of a supernatural thriller that unravels and reinvents the paradigms that compose our philosophies of life, birth, grief and human consequence.What the series is doing, beneath the plot and the mythology and the gorgeous texture of its locations is revealing that the soul is not a metaphor. That compassion is not a virtue but an up-leveled physics. That what happens when you connect with another person, really look, is an encounter with something that cannot be contained in either of you separately. That grief is real and costly and not sacred. That love is not a pastel feeling, but a structural scaffold of existence.Perez has done the patient, intricate work of making you care about specific humans in specific rooms eating specific foods and making specific jokes before it asks you to consider what happens when someone who loves those humans is capable of bending matter with intention and has been - all along, from before any of this started - the person who built the workshop where souls learn to be more than they were.You’ll want to read it again. Which is, perhaps, the point. The prologue of the first book tells you as much: 'you will instantly and irrevocably forget my hushed invasion of your soul.'The second time through, you won’t forget quite as completely. Which is exactly how it works. 6