Aliya Whiteley’s latest novel is unique, a ‘hero’s journey’ more colourful than life, a sense that there is a lacquer over the top of what we read about Fairly – a young ‘quester’ setting off from her home village to explore a strange land. A feeling that we’re reading a description of a videogame rather than seeing the coding underneath, or the inspiration for the story. Which makes it perfect that there is in fact an additional layer of interpretation: hundreds of years later, an archivist living in a very different world (where the individual no longer truly exists, as human consciousness is shared) finds Fairly’s story and annotates it, trying to decode its meaning.

Fairly’s story, titled The Dance of the Horned Road, is weird and sometimes inscrutable, with repeating motifs such as mysterious creatures called cha, a ‘chain device’ Fairly must press at pivotal points in her journey (and which always causes the narrative perspective to shift), and the sinister ‘breathing man’ who stalks her all the way. It can feel useless to try and impose a moral on any of it. My take is that it’s best understood by way of the tension between Fairly’s solitary quest and the archivist’s existence as a person in whom ‘all the information ever amassed’ is contained. It reminded me of books like Confessions of the Fox, The Book of Luce and The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas – none of which are SFF, but all centre on a similar idea about a narrator trying to excavate the truth from a document/cache of evidence, layers of reading on top of reading.

I desperately wanted to like THREE EIGHT ONE. The premise is intriguing and it’s just the kind of quirky book that I usually inhale. The description made it sound like it could have similar vibes to Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into THREE EIGHT ONE at all.

I did enjoy contemplating someone 300 years in the future, trying to sift through all the information humans produce, following clues in a story written in 2024. However, once the 318 word mini-stories started (featuring a girl named Fairly who was very one-dimensional to me) I tuned out and found myself drifting away. In the other timeline, I never related to Rowena, either.

I slogged through hoping that the end would tie all the bizarre parts of THREE EIGHT ONE together, but it never happened for me. I do have to give author Aliya Whitely props for trying something new which does evoke some kind of feeling - but for me, it wasn’t a good one. I’m just exhausted.

Thank you to NetGalley and publisher Rebellion for the opportunity to read a digital ARC of this book and provide my honest feedback.

What an odd book this is.
This is a mundane sci-fi novel, the type that has no intergalactic apocalyptic war and fights. This is all about internal journeys, growth, truth and the meaning of life... it's smart, thought provoking, strange, and not about much at all, really.
Imagine in 300 years if someone tried to understand the people that existed today... imagine that among the monstrous amounts of useless content we create, they selected this one book, this one not particularly good fantasy quest, and analysed it with their own prism... and as you read you start to see more meaning too, and this not very good book starts to acquire depth and is changing... or perhaps you are changing as you're reading?
What a clever book this is.

The novel promises a deep exploration of the coming-of-age theme and the complexities of growth, change, and the loss of innocence, often against our own will. It paints a vivid picture of a world where everything Fairly believed to be true is overturned, leaving her—and readers—questioning the very essence of reality. The path to self-discovery is presented as a common yet uniquely transformative experience for each individual, making readers reflect on the diversity of human journeys.

However, despite its potential and intriguing premise, "The Horned Road" can be a challenging read. The story's cryptic nature and frequent veering into ambiguity may make it difficult for readers to fully connect with the narrative. The lack of clarity can leave readers feeling disoriented and disconnected, much like the protagonist Fairly herself.

The novel's depth and exploration of its themes may be its strongest aspect, but it is equally its downfall. While it attempts to provoke thought and introspection, the complexity of the narrative may overwhelm some readers, making it difficult to fully immerse themselves in the story. The beauty of the novel's central message—the idea that the path to self-discovery can be both universal and profoundly individual—is overshadowed by the difficulty of grasping the storyline.

While this book aims to delve deep into the human experience, the narrative style can be a hurdle for readers looking for a more straightforward connection with the story. For those who enjoy challenging reads that encourage introspection, this novel might hold a unique appeal. However, for those who prefer a more accessible and engaging narrative, it may leave them wanting more, as was my personal experience.

This book is the poster child for trusting the process. I had no idea what was going on for the first 75% or so which was equally madenning and fun, as I enjoyed trying to figure it out. It was a pretty unique plot and I enjoyed Rowena a lot as a main character. The future world she is set in seems quite wild and interesting and the parallel between now and then is well done.

I enjoyed this strange, but very interesting story. Bracketed by someone in the far future discovering it amongst the overwhelming quantity of information from our era, the story takes place present day, but with some fantastical elements. The inner story follows Fairly, a young woman who is on a culturally standard young adult milestone event, a Quest, to follow a special road and learn about mysterious creatures called cha. Fairly is very introspective, and doesn't really connect with other people, so she wanders mostly alone through a series of slightly off experiences. It's not that clear to me what the moral of Fairly's tale is, but it has a profound effect on the reader from the future, and I found it though provoking and unusual.

Three Eight One gave me Murakami-Hard-Boiled-Wonderland vibes and I really enjoyed reading it. This book is about a journey and it is a journey. There were moments where I thought I'd figured it out only to be thrown off course again. Trying to understand what it all means may be futile, but it was certainly entertaining trying to figure it all out....like life itself! It asks interesting questions and exposes you to different points of view. I will have to read this a second time, but I'll get the book so I can read the footnotes more easily (important part of the story and not particularly easy in Ebook format). Recommended!

I received an advanced copy of this book through NetGalley.

At first this book seemed a bit confusing. At the beginning it felt like the author was trying to write a great story about a kind of magical, weird and absurd world, but it seemed just that; trying. Then the story began to take on and became interesting; the first thing that held my attention were cha and the mystery surrounding what they actually were. I finished the book and I'm still not sure about that. Then the final goal of the writer started to feel more comprehensible as the quest took on, and you started to think that you figured out she wanted to represent every human's quest to reach their place and goal in life; but as I finished the book I'm not really sure about that either. At least now the book really seemed to be written to be like that -an actual well constructed story about an absurd universe that in reality is not so distant from our own; but then, this I still have yet to comprehend, the narration switches out of the blue from 2nd to a 3rd person narrator. I think it kind of meant that Fairly was slowly drifting away from her actual goal, as it switched back again at any major epiphany she had, and in the end I believe this to be the most probable explanation, but it really caught me off guard while I was reading because it felt like a mistake; it was so unexpected. Another thing that left me kind of unsure how to feel about it is the woman who years later finds the document of The dance of the Horned Road. When her notes kind of abruptly stop during the book I initially thought she was being forgotten as a character, because it was without notice, and when they picked back up they seemed completely unrelated and also they didn't seem like she was trying to understand Fairly's story anymore; it seemed like, now that she had lived her own life, she was commenting just to make parallels with her own "quest" and not to understand Fairly's. To conclude, this book both kind of kept me hooked and kind of put me into a slump. In the end I think I enjoyed both its absurdity and its connection with real life; it gave me a perspective to reflect on and something to think about.

Side note about the NetGalley epub: I think that the "notes" didn't work perfectly (sometimes you came back to a different part of the story; I wasn't able to find notes 1 and 2; when you finish reading the dance of the horned road you have to search for the continuation of the story for yourself because there isn't a link), and there were also some issues with the text format (sometimes you couldn't highlight just a sentence but it highlighted the whole page).

Interesting..I don’t know,what I think.. nice writing style. Strange adventure and futuristic look back into the adventure. I wanted to finish it and find it a difficult book to categorise even after finishing it. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy.

3.5

This is one of those books that is a bit difficult to talk about, because I don't really know what I think about it, because it's just so unique and unlike anything else I've read recently. There are two halves to the story. The first one is the perspective of Rowena, a sort of curator from the 24th century working on curating things from the primitive internet of the 21st century. And she stumbles upon this strange text from 2024 called "The Dance of the Horned Road", which is the other half of the book (though it occupies more than half the space).

This strange text is about Fairly, a teenage girl from a village who takes on this quest that other young people do when they come of age. She is chased by "the breathing man" along the way. The story just gets weirder and weirder as we get to see more of this quest. And Rowena's thoughts about the text (and how her life is affected by it) are written as footnotes. The first thing that fascinates Rowena about this text is the fact that she can't figure out whether this text is autobiography or some sort of fantasy fiction, and after that it's like going down a rabbit hole.

The story that takes up most of the book, "The Dance of the Horned Road" is both weird and really normal at the same time. On one hand, it's just a regular quest narrative, one that often times seems very straightforward, but other times, there are things that make you wonder if we're following a reliable narrator or not. And not only that, the way it's told is sometimes normal, but other times it would just randomly change from 1st person perspective to second or third (and in the other directions too) within a sentence.

I kept thinking that by the end, things are gonna make complete sense, and it really didn't, and yet that was kinda fitting so it didn't bother me that much, which is just kinda how I feel about the book as a whole. It certainly isn't for everyone, and it will probably end up being polarizing (like around 3.5 average on Goodreads) but I didn't regret reading this book, even if I'm not wholly sure how I feel about it.

Three Eight One consumed me. It carries with it the promise of answers, and leaves behind the maddening conviction that everything will make sense with a little more lateral thinking, one more search, an early clue seen in a new light. It's a short book that forces the reader to confront their own lack of control. Sometimes you can never find out what's behind the other door, but you have to go on living anyway.

Rowena is an archivist trying to parse meaning out of the flood of information that defines the Age of Riches, which is our modern day. Fairly is a young girl who sets out on a quest, as children do in her village, by pressing the button on a chain device that changes her point of view (quite literally). Nothing is guaranteed except the road, the quest, and the breathing man that always follows.

I read this as an ebook and for about half the book figured I would just read the footnotes at the end, since they're a bit hard to click on. Don't do this!! The footnotes, much like in other pseudo-academic works like House of Leaves, continue Rowena's frame story instead of adding information about Fairly's inner story.

Although it's not the point, I couldn't help but come up with my own theories about the cha and the Horned Road and Fairly's quest. Given the conventions Rowena uses to shorten categories in the frame story (ex. UNK for unknown), and a google search that found dozens of poorly processed PDF scans that mentioned "cha" but actually included "CHA-racteristics" or "CHA-nge", I thought cha might be an abbreviation for some other word. One of these PDFs was "The Power of Archives: Archivists' Values and Value in the Postmodern Age", which felt relevant but could easily have been a coincidence.

In the Library of Congress code, 381 is the field defined as "Other Distinguishing Characteristics of Work or Expression", which further makes me think that the cha and the quest represent a journey to distinguish one's own character and values in a society which no longer has any hardships.

However, Fairly's quest also maps well to the Hero's Journey monomyth, which by definition contains CHA-llenges and results in the hero returning CHA-nged. It's even possible the cha are devoted cosplayers of Big Challenges, the beloved Sanrio crocodile, or links between the CHA-in devices, or that the frequent references to dancing do imply that the cha-cha is relevant, or that cha is simply short for "chalet attendant". Three Eight One is full of meaning that means everything, nothing, maybe something different to each reader -- I can't get any of it out of my head.

Three Eight One is most comparable to The Saint of Bright Doors, the uncanny almost-familiarity of surreal children's book sequels like Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Pilgrim's Progress without the Christianity, and experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon while being overwhelmed with endless search results.

I received an advance e-copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.