Legion: Skin Deep

Easily more fun than Legion was. It'll be interesting to see where Sanderson goes with these stories in the future; there's no doubt that this isn't the last we'll be seeing of Stephen Leeds, aka Legion.

When a corpse goes missing from a morgue, a deadly new weapon may have just been misplaced. The corpse is that of an experimental biotechnologist, and within its cells is a secret of astronomic proportions with deadly applications. As the CDC and FBI immediately declare a quarantine on the company the technologist worked for, and Stephen Leeds finds himself trapped in the unfolding crisis, it becomes a race against time for Legion to recover the body before its secrets can be unlocked and a deadly, unstoppable new bio weapon is unleashed on the world.

Apart from the novel main character, I have to admit I was largely unimpressed by Legion. That rapidly changed in Skin Deep, Stephen Leeds' second published adventure. Sanderson weaves a fun, action packed romp that blasts out of the starting gate and never relents until the last shot is fired, firmly living up to the thrilling nature of this particular thriller. I found it almost as a rule to be a much more fun read than the previous Legion novel, and also a much more interesting one as Sanderson carefully uses the plot to delve deeper into the nature of Legion and his psychosis.

As fun a tale as it is, Sanderson carefully takes his time to delve into the nature of Stephen Leeds' curious mental condition. What if Leeds isn't insane? What if he were just the victim of some strange phenomena, and the only way conventional science can explain it is insanity? I found this to be a very, very interesting line of thought, and one I hoped Sanderson would have made the full use of. Instead, a few thrilling pages after this exciting idea is presented, Sanderson promptly chucks it screaming over the balcony through the development of one of Leeds' aspect, which emphatically derails the entire train of thought simply by her actions over the course of the book.

I wish I could say that was my only complaint of the novella, but then we get to Sanderson's prolific, groan worthy humor which he insists on permeating the novella with. Combined with a character like J.C. that simply feels like he's trying too hard, a lot of the fun of the novella got sapped between the two.

Another interesting part of the story was the aspects themselves, which Sanderson spends a little more time fleshing out and exploring. In the case of one, he even creates a little mystery. What does it mean when the imagination of an imagination manifests itself? And then there's the revelations regarding the psyches of the aspects themselves. Not to mention their interactions with the other aspects, and most of all, how they all react to the possibility that they simply all exist in the imagination of one man. It all makes for an interestingly tangled situation that's strangely fun to read about.

Ultimately, by Sanderson novella standards, it's decent. Legion will probably never be a favorite of mine or anything, but it's definitely shaping up to be a guaranteed fun read whenever I decide to grab one in the future. It's certainly not his best novella to date [see Sixth of the Dusk], but if you're a Sanderson fan there are worst ways to spend your time.