MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleMiller has a great talent for creating interesting characters and building up quiet dread. Ronan himself is tremendously flawed, and it’s his trauma that makes him so relatable, rather than his addiction, which is barely relevant ... Hudson. Ronan sometimes seemingly moves between reality and a drug-fueled haze. To a fault, it can be hard to tell whether he’s inhabiting the same world as the other characters ... The idea of a gay man coming to terms with his past to save the future, working with his friends, navigating a complicated history with a rekindled lover, repairing his relationship with his ailing father, and the complications of gentrification — all of this is timely and interesting ... Where the book goes wrong is Miller’s introduction of bizarre supernatural elements, which never work and sideline the more intriguing threads. It quickly becomes a freight train of random side characters, ghosts and whale gods speeding toward a denouement of violence that our main characters aren’t even a part of ... Still, Miller is a talent worth keeping an eye on. His characterizations are interesting, even if the execution of the story isn’t as successful as it started out. Had The Blade Between stuck to being a study of Ronan’s trauma, his past dealings with homophobia, and coming to terms with addiction and guilt of abandoning his father, it could have been a revelatory book ... Unfortunately, it all gets bogged down by the inexplicable.
