First of all, I love the cover of this book! It sets the mood for the story well. There is sort of a hovering gloom throughout, and I did not expect the ending.

This book is quick and easy to read, but unfortunately it missed the mark for me. I just feel that I became overwhelmed by the amount of characters to keep track of. Despite this, I will be looking for other releases by Perry in the future.

MAMMOTH by Douglas Perry is an interesting but at times difficult to follow novel that takes place in Mammoth View, California in the immediate wake of a suspected disaster possibly related to an earthquake causing civil unrest and uncertainty among the residents and visitors of the small community.

Several of the main characters take turns being the focal point of each chapter of the book, but the constant shift of focus creates difficulties in having a cohesive storyline for much of this story, although in fairness everything does come together eventually and the lives of all the characters intersect moving toward the conclusion that has an interesting revelation of the catalyst that created the mass panic.

While well worth the effort of reading, this novel definitely is requiring of patience on the part of the reader to stay with the story as it unfolds.

3 stars.

This book was busy. A lot of stuff going on. The beginning was great then it all when wonky.

I was drawn to this book from the premise and the interesting cover design. The actual plot and characters turned out to be not very interesting at all. Its a short book, but felt like it kept dragging on and on. Their were quite a few characters that the chapters followed and flipped flopped back and forth between. Normally I like this, but the way it was done here, I found it confusing and couldn't keep the characters straight. I've seen this technique done in other stories where there is a catastrophe in town and its worked very well. This book was too short to develop the characters well enough to make this work.

This book is a conundrum for me. At first, I could barely understand what was going on. People are getting the hell out of town and there's no reasonable explanation for why. There really wasn't a concrete explanation throughout the entire book as to why people were running and scared and evacuating. There is a pair of brothers who seem to be wreaking havoc and taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by what seems like violent confusion, along with a bank robbery not committed by the brothers, but nothing is extremely clear. There are some characters you get to know fairly well and characters that almost remain a mystery throughout. All in all, I enjoyed reading it, but I still couldn't definitively tell you what it was about, other than some kind of mystery/suspense occurring in a California mountain town. It was good and I would recommend it. I just can't say exactly why.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book, and it’s primarily because Perry’s character building is absolutely outstanding. Every single voice is well realised and it’s so easy to picture the person leading the chapter.

Where it falls down slightly is in the final reveal – there’s a madcap brilliance behind the true nature of the attack that sends people running for the hills (well, from the hills), but it’s such an abrupt revelation that it makes all that world building and characterisation see, a little pointless.

That being said, the more I’ve thought about this book since finishing it (and I’ve thought about it a lot), the more I’m okay with that. The point of the novel is not necessarily in finding out what actually happened in Mammoth View, but rather getting to know the people moving in and around the area – it seems to work best as a showcase for Perry’s really quite impressive cast of characters, and there’s nothing wrong with that, especially when so many of the characters are still sticking in my head days later.

It might not be what you expect – from reviews I’ve read and even from my own expectations, that seems to be a common theme – but if you’re looking for well developed characters and a pervading sense of mystery, you could do a lot worse than Mammoth.