239 pages
English language
Published Aug. 31, 2007
At nearly fifteen years of age, Joey Harker learns that he is a Walker, able to travel between dimensions, and soon joins a team of different versions of himself, each from another dimension, to fight the evil forces striving to conquer all the worlds.
This doesn't read like a Neil Gaiman book. Neither the writing nor the plot ever really finds a good flow and the characters are underdeveloped. I did enjoy the colorful bubble -- easily my favorite character.
If this had just been written by an author I'd never heard of, I might've given it two stars, but since it has Gaiman's name on it I hold it to a higher standard. After reading this, I can only think of sketchy reasons for why Gaiman's name is on this piece of garbage.
It doesn't read like his collaboration with Terry Pratchett: "Good Omens". There is no mark of his hand at all. The writing is clunky and the similes are just so bad that they are like leftover school pizza (almost exactly like that). The protagonist is an idiot, and unfortunately it is only by his idiocy that the plot moves at all. Any good possible uses of the many-worlds setting are wasted in favor of paper villains and a war that fails to feel like it matters in any way.
I quick and captivating read, as it's actually a young adult book. The story is very Gaimanesque, the writing style not so much - it's obvious that Gaiman's partner in crime did most of the writing. I found the writing style a bit naive, it reads like someone's first book ever. Having read the bit about the authors in the back cover, it's obvious why; Michael Reaves is actually a television writer who wrote Emmy winning Star Trek episodes. Interworld was originally supposed to be a TV show, and it does seem a bit like a pilot - the big plot is solved in the end, but there are some lose ends left.
I like the concept of the book, it made me think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be a HEX show and Doctor Who would be a binary show, sort of...
