The Last Storm by Tim Lebbon

​This one set on my TBR list for a while, and in all honesty, I maybe should have left it sitting there. But then I’ve been a fan of Lebbon for a long time and was curious what he’d been up to. Apparently, this climate disaster of a novel. Which objectively isn’t a disaster of a novel, but it does leave a lot to be desired.
Outside of occasional odd word repetition (which should have been dealt with in editorial), Lebbon is actually a very good writer. It’s what attracted me to his books in the first  place. Literary, in my books, is the best horror, and Lebbon goes for literary. Character driven, well described, all that.
What’s missing here is on the plot side of things.
Droughts had turned a significant swatch of North America into a desert. It could use some rain. And, conveniently enough, the is a Rainmaker available. Only he doesn’t do that anymore and has done all he  could to stop his daughter, who intertied his gift, from doing it too.
As it turns out, when one makes the rain, they bring down more than  just water. No idea why. None is this is really explained. The Rainmaking thing isn’t really explained either.
The author chose to focus on the actual play-by-play of the chase (two chases, technically)  that’s at the heart of this novel. It unravels in almost real time from multiple perspectives in minute detail.
Lebon is good on detail, but at some point it becomes glaringly obvious that the entire novel is just people driving and shooting in the desert. It overrides everything, even the characters. Not to mention, the multiple perspective thing is drastically overdone with a dizzying amount of switches. People, tenses, etc. It’s way too much.
It’s almost like there’s all this descriptive writing and narrative trickery to distract you from how thin the plot actually is.
So, overall, it reads easily and quickly and is technically accomplished, but doesn’t really engage. Good writing goes a long way for me, but this was likely one of my least favorite Lebbon books. Interested to see how he does on the next one, where he goes from dust to snow. Thanks Netgalley.