How good a writer is he in his own right?
On the strength of this book, sadly, not very good at all. The most interesting thing about this book was finding a bookmark inside from when I clearly gave up on reading it 25 years ago. The bookmark was a slip of paper from the job centre and was dated 26/1/94.
The cover is quite cool. Star publishers did good cover. The basic idea of the story is actually a pretty good one. A chat show host - Grady Calhoun - is cursed by the sillily named Calvin Rajelis and told he will die in 45 days by his own hand to stop the suffering of those he loves and cares for. From that point on, nasty things start happening to his friends and family.
The first chapter was good. There are one or two pages later on where he demonstrates reasonable writing skill and an ability to create a good atmosphere. Sadly the book is 251 pages long.
The main let down is that, to take the story seriously, and therefore for any atmosphere to affect us, we a) need to like the main character, and b) take astrology seriously. Unfortunately, the lead character is bland beyond words. We don't like him, we don't really dislike him (except for one point which I will come to later). And astrology plays an enormous part in this story. The expert he turns to for help is an astrologer who has page long speeches about Saturn rising in Uranus etc.
Apparently Calvin is not just guided by evil stars, he may well be able to manipulate his own future by influencing some sort of OTT astrological bulldust. I tuned out of the explanations by that point.
Calvin is also in league with/controlling/a reincarnation of some weird type of ghost/zombie/disembodied soul or something that's never quite made clear but is apparently something to do with astrology. This ghost/zombie/starsoul thing - called Billy Salvo - goes round killing and hurting everyone Grady loves/likes and occasionally just someone he said hello to at a dinner party. He can appear in any shape to whoever and can be in multiple places at once.
The surrounding characters, or shreddies - since most of them exist only to die in aid of what plot there might be - are even more bland. The staff at the tv station meld into one person after a while, so devoid are they of distinguishing characteristics.
His love interest, the stupidly named Bud Rocker (a weathergirl from the tv station he works at) has almost as much personality as boiled, unseasoned tofu.
He attempts to give the token black character a personality by using unconvincing street slang and having him call Grady Grade-A because that is obviously such a funny running joke.
The ex wife has slightly less backbone than the average slug, and I would personally rather spend time with a slug than anyone like her. The four children he has with the ex wife barely feature (except for the older son - who I will come back to later), even in Grady's internal monologues. For characters as apparently central to the twisted revenge plot, they needed to be actual personalities. I think we were supposed to sympathise with them just because they're children. But that's not enough.
The story is nonsensical and poorly constructed. Characters and locations change from one paragraph to the next with no warning or indication. No double spacing between paragraphs where a total change of narrative point has occurred, no
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or anything of the sort. Just a total offputting switch from one line of text to the next.
One or two of the deaths are well thought out. The mad cat lady's death was reasonably amusing. When Bud's sister is tricked into assaulting her own child, that was actually fairly effective. The rest are well... not so good.
There is a scene where Billy Salvo apparently rapes the ex wife, on the front seat of a small car, without adjusting the angle of the seat, without moving onto her side of the car, without the handbrake and gearstick getting in his way. The longer the scene dragged on for, the more I wondered how it would be physically possible. A scene of that type should leave you shocked at what's happened to the character, not wondering about the practicalities.
Attempted rape was used against Bud later on in the book. This is the description given when Bud looks at Billy's penis.
"...even his private parts were not quite normal. When he undoubtedly functioned - she could not question that, didn't dare hope after what had happened to poor Jean Calhoun - it wasn't right.The thing was corrupt, unclean. It observed ancient, malodorous midnights."
Add to prose as deathless as that, and the use of rape as a weapon against the only two central females in the story, the fact that one of the torments visited on Grady is that he's made to think his oldest son might be gay... (That's the bit I said I'd come back to - twice) this is not a book I would recommend for anyone to read.
I should have realised when the back cover said "...there were no options left. He had to fight the curse that was killing his loved ones OR give in to the overpowering evil of the... Noonspell" (emphasis mine because an OR indicates a freaking option) that this may not be the best book ever written.
2/10
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