Kim Newman seems to be a playful author, always up for mashing genres together, so I suppose it was only a matter of time until he turned his eye towards role playing novels.

Life’s Lottery (603 Pages) has you playing Keith Oliver Marion a fairly standard sort of person, with an average birth, unless you make a fatal error in your choices at the beginning and then you’re dead. You get to make choices all through Keith’s life and many of your choices will not end well.

I did find that I spent a lot of time backtracking on Keith’s life trying to get a better outcome, many of the, literal, dead ends came from the choices I made about how he treated various people in his life. I’m not sure whether that is illuminating about how the book is constructed of a criticism of the choices many readers would make.

Successfully get Keith to adulthood and you realise that the book ties in with the world created in Newman’s Quorum novel, which kind of helps as you know which people definably not to trust. Persevere and the outcome range from the mundane to the fantastic.

The adult role-playing book shows all of Newman’s literary inventiveness, although if you’re looking for a traditional novel structure you may be a little disappointed.

9

Charles Packer