Number 27 - Cat's cradle - William W Johnstone

 

Some books can be judged by their covers. Personally I loved this cover, which is why I bought the book. And the only reason it's staying in my collection. 

Because good god, this is a bad book. There's an imagination on display, but, other than the cover, that's the only positive about the entire thing.

I wish we'd had the story described on the back cover. That sounded like it could be interesting.  But instead of an evil girl and her cat being adopted into the life of the town and steadily spreading evil (something that's hinted at early on when she steals money from one of her victims) they spend the whole book in hiding while a bunch of random creatures start attacking the town.

The girl and her cat are responsible for some of the creatures but not all. The effects of their bite on victims is so random that any sense of logic vanishes from the narrative very early on. 

The imagination is on full display, but it's totally unfocussed on making a coherent narrative and more like a group of 10 year old children trying to tell the grossest story they can and going off at tangents with each child telling a different story.

This is before I even mention the style of the writing. It's terrible, overblown and nonsensical.

Any book that closes a chapter with "Anya and Pet laughed and laughed" is going to score badly with me. There's one point where a character has his head ripped off and is described as flopping about, nearly dead, a page later. The monster of the moment is running around with his head from the jaw upwards, but his body isn't quite dead yet???? This isn't even the worst part of the book.  That would be the closing few chapters. or maybe the bit where a woman, on finding the dead bodies of a bunch of local teens, pretends to faint, because she thinks that's what you're supposed to do in this situation.

The characters barely deserve the title of character, most of them struggling to rise to one dimensional. It's impossible to feel any sense of tension with the level of stupidity on display. The shreddies (characters with no purpose but to die horribly without affecting the central cast) are uninspired and their deaths aren't nasty enough.

I don't think I've read about as many characters losing their lunch in one book.  It must happen every three pages on average. At least 6 women genuinely faint at the sight of a dead body too, two in two pages at one point.

The only good thing about this book is that I now have a definite worst book I've read this year, and it will take some beating to lose the bottom spot. This is uninspired, cliched, badly written dreck.

File it under I read it so you don't have to.