another intriguing development in this series! unfortunately i do know one major spoiler, but that's on me i suppose. really loved the concept of this, totally unexpected.

Forget what I said in my first review on The Armageddon Chair. Not everything, but some selective things, like is happening to the characters in this grander Eternity Club story. What I then said about Dorian Gray and doing the big epic even though time is short? How that doesn’t apply here. Forget it! I lied. Had that planned. Totally. I just like to lie in reviews and not actually give my opinion ha ha. Anyways.

A departure from the ‘sitcommy-vibeszz’ that the previous stories more or less kept to. Though that’s not really true either. The first two were enough alike, but the series has actually been very quite diverse so far. Though this story is definitely the largest differentiator yet. Foley goes for Le Big Epic™ in this story. Even if it has arguably the silliest title yet too, even winning from Rhubarb (getoutofmyhead) for me. The story might still start off with that silly premise, and to be honest, if you think about it, conceptually the entire thing is just so silly that that never truly stops, but tonally the fact that life has sprouted in a big cloakroom and the coats are offering our main characters to their cloak-gods by throwing them in a big pool of lava (they’re still in the cloakroom btw) is played completely straight. And not even in a parodic manner. Everything is honestly quite epic, and the message about life is honest and pure. It’s just about living clothing.

So yeah, we do start going to the ‘Dorian Gray way’ here. Epic and cool. A feeling like we’re exploring a huge cave where we can encounter everything, and it’s quite nice. Some spelunking, eh?

So like, yeah, nice. That’s what it is. A lot of this adventure is just really nice. But it keeps at being just a really nice adventure. It greatly plays on the character dynamics between Benny and Secretary Pym and improves on them with also that really nice ending moment, and there I go, I said that it’s nice again. The teases of mystery are also really nice. Never goes much beyond that for me though. It’s very good, very solid and imaginative. Just can’t find much more in it like with the others.

I guess I’m missing the irony here? Like on one hand I really appreciate its honesty, and to just be whimsical and have this crazy plot without falling into farce, but I feel like Eternity Club so far has benefited from its satirical tone. But I’m also very happy with this story just like it is exactly because it is so different. Variety is nice. Dang it I said it again.

Okay this one was fine I think volume 1 over all is stronger but I’m still very much invested in this story

It's fun seeing shorter stories from Foley. There's his classic eye for big images, but all compressed. The ideas here really work. I like how the mystery of the Oldest Member is clearly not going the obvious route.