SPFBO 9: The Fall Is All There Is By C.M. Caplan

Welcome to the Final stage of SPFBO 9! As you know, the 10 blogs all picked their champion who advanced into the finals, including ourselves. Check out our SPFBO 9 page for more info! SPFBO 9 ends on April 30th, and so we’ll post our finalist reviews every two weeks or so until then.

Our 3rd SPFBO 9 finalist review is for The Fall Is All There Is by C.M. Caplan. The order of the reviews within a post will be in alphabetical order.

A quick reminder about how we are proceeding in the Finals: our judges had the freedom to opt out of reading any of the books due to personal interest, time restrictions, unforeseen life events, etc. Our aim is to have at least 4 reviews/scores for each finalist.

Both in the Semi-Final and Final stages we’ll have a DNF rule in place: if a judge reads a book (either semi-finalist or finalist if they didn’t opt out beforehand), they have to read at least 25% of it. If they decide to DNF between 25%-50% they’ll have to give a score but can opt out of writing a review, and if they DNF after 50% (or not) then also have to score AND write a review.

For The Fall Is All There Is we have 4 reviews and 4 scores for your reading pleasures.

So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at our 3rd finalist!

Series:	standalone
Genre:	Fantasy
Publisher:	self-published
Date of Publishing:	November 7, 2022

All Petre Mercy wanted was a good old-fashioned dramatic exit from his life as a prince. But it’s been five years since he fled home on a cyborg horse. Now the King—his Dad—is dead—and Petre has to decide which heir to pledge his thyroid-powered sword to.

As the youngest in a set of quadruplets, he’s all too aware that the line of succession is murky. His siblings are on the precipice of power grabs, and each of them want him to pick their side.

If Petre has any hope of preventing civil war, he’ll have to avoid one sibling who wants to take him hostage, win back another’s trust after years of rivalry and resentment, and get an audience with a sister he’s been avoiding for five years.

Before he knows it, he’s plunged himself into a web of intrigue and a world of strange, unnatural inventions just to get to her doorstep.

Family reunions can be a special form of torture.

Jen

Read: 100%

I have been seeing The Fall Is All There Is around Twitter for a few months now and the cover intrigued me so much that I had to check out the sample – which I read exactly two paragraphs of and bought the book on that basis. Ultimately the story ended up being a mixed bag of things I loved, and things I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about.

The Fall Is All There Is was one weird blend of genres, and some of the stuff that happens, like the cyborg horse exploding (yes, it’s as messy as it sounds) just had me chuckling in its absurdity. I loved that about it! Who knew post-apocalyptic future cyber-fantasy could be so much fun? I also loved the extra little bit of creepy with the Ghostfog to really round out the weirdness of it all. It’s creative, unique, and just all-around cool.

Petre, after five years of being away, is asked to return home. All kinds of baggage comes with that request – his relationship with his family is messy as heck. Petre didn’t leave on good terms, mind you, he didn’t tell anyone he was leaving so it wasn’t really bad terms either, more like running away.

For the most part, I loved the voice of Petre. He is our window and through him we learn about the world and his relationship with his siblings. He’s funny and relatable and sometimes his headspace can be quite chaotic.

Things I did wish to understand better were the politics; which felt a little vague at times. There are secrets galore and our POV doesn’t allow us answers to certain things, in part because Petre has been gone for so many years and in part because so much is tied to the relationships between the siblings themselves and we are just joining the chaos now.

Which brings me to the other thing I wished to understand better – the dynamics of their relationships. There’s a whole subtext of years of accumulated mental and physical wounds between these now grown kids, that have built-up into these mixed-up feelings of hurt, and anger in their love of each other (just like any family) but we aren’t privy to most of these events that caused this automatic distrust of the others’ intentions, or the need to try constantly outthink each other.

So as much as I enjoyed Petre, I sometimes wished for other POVs because it felt that we are just left on the outside looking in, wondering why they are being such prickly jerks and the whole combination could be exhausting, and maybe just a little too real and similar to me and my siblings, because I found myself getting annoyed with them, their arguments and the occasional pettiness, and I just wanted to be able to slam the door in their face or something equally petty myself.

Anyway, frustrations at family relations aside, my favourite sibling ended up being Desmond. This had a lot to do with this huge blow-up he had at Petre where we got to hear a little of his feelings about what growing up together was like. I found this very refreshing as most of the rest of the time it was all very one-sided. (Can you tell I am the mediator of our family?) It could very well be that we get more in-depth into all their relationships as the series progresses too. I hope so because they’re definitely a quirky bunch.

TLDR:

The Fall Is All There Is, has a lot going for it. It’s a nutty, chaotic story at times and I’d say that it is more about family and navigating the relationships between the siblings, than who is in line to be the next successor. And yes, there were things I personally felt could use some fleshing out but the story on the whole is just a lot of crazy fun.

Seriously, I mean, how many stories open by saying that their mom threatened to sew their mouth shut, and they actually meant it? Like, for real?

Liis

Read: 100%

The Fall Is All There Is… Welcome to a post-apocalyptic world that is full of creatively cool things such as toxic air that can infect a person with dead lives, mechanical horses, and scientific advancement in terms of fixing up or enhancing the organic matter that is the human being. What kicks this story off is of political nature, but I would not say the political intrigue is the main focus of the book.

The King is dead and one of the quadruplet siblings is going to be wearing the crown. With the threat of revolt and betrayal, our neurodiverse MC Petre, who has been away from home for 5 years, is called back home. Thus ensues a trip through the weird world where nothing is certain, and a lot of things can kill you. Whilst Petre is trying to figure out exactly what is going on, using bits of information from his siblings and never the full story, there is ample time for mega arguments, miscommunications, trust issues, a rushed sexual encounter, and a ton of physical hurt. I’m talking about limbs being lost and the like. The dynamics in between the quadruplets is quite dramatic, (or maybe it isn’t, and it only comes across as such from Petre’s POV?) and the psychological aspect of the relationship of the siblings and within the family as a whole might be more relatable to some than others.

The delivery of the story makes me think the point of it all lies in the human aspect of it and this whole royal and political conflict is just an aid in directing the spotlight to what is important here. Reading it all from Petre’s POV gives us a firsthand experience of what it might be like to live with the constant mental overload caused by the half-truths and unsaid words by others. The atmosphere in this story is thick with secrets, miscommunications, and what-ifs causing further situations that may otherwise be avoided. So, I think this was one thing Caplan tried to get across in the book – how it feels inside someone else’s head – and I think he succeeded. There is hardly a reader out there that will not literally experience this book in their heads, the frustrations due to misconceptions, the doubts, the wandering mind… For this alone, I would rate the book an 8.

And so, on the one hand, I appreciate the author for delivering this experience. On the other, I must admit defeat to being able to really absorb the story in full. Some scenes of sibling “clashes” or interactions went on for longer than necessary. There was a lot of panicking within some scenes, making the characters just sigh out expletives and curses, dragging the moment on with no real action, and whilst it helps with truly zooming into the moment, to me it felt unnecessary. I did find myself skimming the text to find the point or important information of each scene so that it would act like a stepping stone taking me towards the conclusion. And so, with a couple of more personal pet peeves making an appearance in terms of delivery/writing itself, and the fact that I was skim-reading for the conclusion, I would rate my personal enjoyment of this book a 3… Personal average score can be found in the below scorecard.

Olivia

Read: 100%

The Fall is All There Is might be the strangest grimdark science-fiction/fantasy political intrigue chaos mess that I have ever read. It made me want to hide beneath my blanket and never talk to another human being again. I don’t think I could actually endure reading it for a second time. It was glorious.

The novel follows Petre Mercy, a self-exiled prince whose only goal in life is to hide from his toxic family and their politics. Obviously, as soon as the book begins, Petre is dragged back into family drama kicking and screaming. Within the first few paragraphs, I already suspected that Petre was autistic. A page or so later, the book confirmed it.

Petre’s autism is, in at least one respect, absolutely crucial to any reader’s understanding of the story. Because despite casual references to ghost fog, living zombies, thyroid-powered swords, and even stranger things, this book is really a kind of slow-burn nightmare fuel for anyone who happens to be autistic. Petre spends the entire book desperately begging people to be honest with him, knowing all the while that he can’t really force anyone to give him the truth. He fumbles around just doing the best he can, aware that the people he loves most are the ones most likely to lie to him, even as he tries to protect them.

I’m genuinely curious how neurotypical readers are likely to interpret this book, and whether they’ll feel the same horrified claustrophobia that it induced in me as an autistic reader. I honestly can’t be certain, which is—I suppose—the exact point that the book sometimes makes.

Setting aside the book’s themes, however, there’s a genuine art to the novel’s prose. Several times per page, it seemed, I found myself absorbed in the (sometimes gruesome) poetry of a sentence or a metaphor. Occasionally, the prose could actually lean too artful—there were times when I finished a sentence, absorbed it, and then realised that I wasn’t entirely certain what it meant. Despite this, I don’t think I’d change a single sentence in this book; instead, I might have appreciated the addition of a few simple follow-up sentences in plainer language, just to reassure me that I had truly understood the implications of the techno-zombie(?) horse’s innards.

As a narrator, Petre had an incredibly strong voice which instantly caught my interest and didn’t let go. Despite being thrown into the deep end in chapter one and asked to swim, I was never once tempted to put the book down. The story kept up a constant dramatic tension, as even simple interactions brought up questions about what Petre would do if it later turned out that the person in front of him was lying. The book’s tone always felt consistent. The world-building was slightly macabre, absolutely bizarre, and never layered on too thickly (which happens to be my favourite sort of world-building).

And, well. No wonder. As soon as I reached the acknowledgements, I saw a who’s who of previous SPFBO authors, all of whom seem to have helped with the book’s editing. The Fall is All There Is had a strong manuscript, made even stronger by the people who contributed to its polish.

Honestly, this book was a work of art that will probably linger in my anxiety-fuelled nightmares for days. I never, ever want to read it again. So… thanks, Caplan?

Take your stupid score and get out of here.

Paul

Read: 100%

It’s been quite a while since I turned my hand to a review, so I apologise for its guaranteed low quality and brevity. Getting back into reviewing by tackling The Fall Is All There Is is the equivalent of getting back into running by entering the Marathon des Sables.

The Fall Is All There Is is a difficult book to both read and review as it’s just so completely different from anything else out there. It’s got the weirdness of Gene Wolfe’s The Book Of The New Sun, the techno-feudal vibes of Frank Herbert’s Dune, and the sexual energy of a frenzied windmill-off between Lynch and Cronenberg, both completely naked, slathered in baby-oil and off their tits on ‘shrooms.

Uniqueness is definitely The Fall Is All There Is’s strength, it’s a patchwork of myriad interesting and uncommon ideas, though they struggle at times to gel together owing to the sheer number and intensity. It feels as there are three overlapping worlds, constantly phasing in and out over each other, such that I couldn’t get a solid grasp as to what the setting actually was. At times, it felt like a non-earth post-apocalyptic world, but then it would feel very ‘our world now’, and there were some shades of a more feudal setting, though less than I’d expect for an SPFBO entry. It’s not really an issue as you read though given you’re constantly being rubbernecked like you’re in audience with the Old Spice man ‘Look a thyroid sword, but over here a robotic attack pug, but what about the corpses of dead kaiju being used as houses…’ you don’t have time to think as you’re slapped about the chops for 412, but come the end there are quite a few ‘hang on a minutes’ and a dearth of unanswered questions.

Our MC is complicated and likeable, with the entirety of the book being very much a stream of consciousness, though given how frantic it is from start to finish, it’s less a stream and more a tsunami. For me, there was a captivating strength in Petre’s voice, and I was able to suspend my disbelief at the wider miasma of oddness because of how much I believed in him.

The Fall Is All There Is is an experience, and C.M. Caplan deserves a great deal of praise for putting something out there that is so unique yet palpably personal. Caplan’s first novel The Sword In The Street is one of my favourite self-published books of recent years. The Fall Is All There Is has only cemented they of the glorious biceps as one of the most exciting and creative word-smiths out there.