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.

Number 58 - Shock Value - assorted writers

 

I bought this at Grimmfest from the publisher's stall. I thought it looked like it would be a fun little cheat read.

I was half right.

It was a cheat read and over in slightly under an hour.

Fun barely featured.

This is an anthology of horrors in comic form.  When I glanced through it at the stall, I thought the art looked quite good. That's true for two of the 6 stories involved. The other's the art is almost as good as the stories they're telling.

Sadly, the stories contained in this collection range from piss poor to just OK.  

The story about the vampires contracting a disease is interesting but isn't actually a story, more a jumping off point for something bigger and better.  It was an interesting concept (and better art than some of the others) but it is just an idea rather than a story with beginning, middle and end. This is still the best part of the publication.

The invisible man story was just about passable.

The three-part story with the mermen is just atrocious. The writing is poor and the artwork even worse. I hope I never have to read anything else that bad again.

I know that a 6-page comic strip is not a lot of time to tell a satisfying story, but it can be done. With only the two exceptions above, all the stories in this book fail spectacularly, either let down by script or artwork or both. 

This was a bad choice of cheat read. I can see what it was aiming at - but it missed on nearly all counts. I could have bought a few more drinks with the money I spent on this.  I'm annoyed about that... 

Number 54 - Death on a warm wind - Douglas Warner

 This was a cheat read randomly chosen from my TBR shelves mainly for the thickness of the book and the rather interesting cover.

I think I found it in the charity section at the front of my local Tesco a couple of years back.  After reading it, it's going straight back there.

Douglas Warner died in 1967 apparently. This copy must have been printed in the early seventies since the price on the back cover is in decimal currency (25p in case you're interested). 

He's a bit of a forgotten author and wrote 4 books whose titles started Death On A ___. It's fair to say I will not be seeking out any of his other books. This one was more than enough.

This is a clear contender for worst book of the year so far.  Maybe the past several years. I would rather read the Louise Penny/Hilary Clinton book again than this one.

It's a shame because the opening couple of pages of this are very good.  The opening sentence is a corker "Robert Colston died three times, though only the last one was for keeps"

It goes downhill rapidly from thereon in.

The story follows a newspaper editor - Ian Curtis - who witnesses the final death of Robert Colson, shot dead in front of the newspaper offices where he (Ian) works whist attempting to deliver an urgent message.

Curtis decides to investigate and uncovers a terrible conspiracy. 

When I say a terrible conspiracy, I don't just mean that in the world these characters inhabit, the consequences could be dire, I mean the conspiracy is badly thought out, implausible and totally stupid.

It all links to five years previously when Robert had predicted an earthquake that was going to strike the town of Arminster before it happened.  Of course, he wasn't believed and 95,000 people apparently died in the tragedy. 

This is where things start to get really silly. We find out the details of the earthquake in chapters 3 through 8, a good third of the book. This is supposed to be in the form of an article about the earthquake commissioned by Curtis from his star reporter called Holt. These chapters are supposed to be the article Holt wrote.  Characters refer to phrases used in this segment later on.  Therefore, you would expect it to be written as per a newspaper article.  

However, it's written in close third person, swapping between about 7 characters (including Colston even though there's no way Holt could have talked to him). The language used is unlike any ever in any newspaper ever published. It's 40 pages long - and it's the worst depiction of an earthquake ever set to paper.

The first one bunch of characters know about it is when the chandelier in their ballroom starts swinging like a pendulum. Take note that this is apparently a force 8.7 quake, but the characters haven't felt the earth move at this point. The fact that an earthquake of this magnitude is so localised as well seems rather implausible.

We also hear about one pair of young newlyweds and their sexual misadventures just before the quake hits (she is refusing his advances because she's never done it before, just before the room collapses on them killing her), because obviously this would be included in an article written for publication in an evening paper, and something that the surviving member of the couple would tell the journalist in the first place. 

Colston is living in this town even though he knows what's happening.  he knew ten hours before the quake the time it would happen and the epicentre. However, when his warnings fell on deaf ears, he went back to his boarding house and didn't clear off out of the town. Therefore, he's caught in the quake, loses his memory because of a blow to the head, and regains his memory 5 years later when he's assaulted and hit on the head a second time.

The reason Colston knew the earthquake was going to happen?  It had been hot weather for five weeks and there was a warm wind from the south... That explains the title at least. Even for the time it was written the science is hokey and unbelievably badly thought out.

The political intrigue he tries to instill into the plot is a damp squib. A couple of shouting matches between two equally tedious characters.

If this hadn't been only 133 pages, I might have given up on it. The contents of the message that Colston was trying to give to Curtis is so obvious, and such a coincidence that he got his memory back just in time before the events of the last section of the book.

All this is told in a deathless prose that barely held my interest and it was a struggle to carry on with it. This isn't a so bad it's good book. It's just bad. It's close to unreadable.  It's a couple of hours of my life that I wish I could have back.

I read this so you don't have to.

Number 32 - State of Terror - Hillary Clinton & Louise Penny

 

This review will contain some spoilers.

I'll start with the positives.  It was a fast read. The story has the potential to be interesting. I also found a really interesting bookmark in it left by the previous owner.

That's that bit over and done with.

The back cover proclaims this to be the most authentic political thriller I'll ever read. I'm sorry but if Dr Seuss wrote one it would feel more genuine than this. The last Carl Hiaasen felt a lot more realistic than this - and it was well written - which gives it a huge advantage over this farrago of a novel.

This is by far the worst written book I've read in years.  The prose can charitably be described as clunky. if I wasn't feeling charitable, I'd go for frenetic, irritating and just plain bad.

The writers seem to think that action sequences are best done with ever shorter sequences featuring different characters finishing by cutting away from what the final character sees without telling the reader what that was.  

At some point in the next chapter, one of the other characters will talk about what happened. 

The lead character Ellen is the newly appointed secretary of State for the USA, appointed despite being a huge political rival to the newly incumbent president. We might as well call her Mary Sue as she is the most obvious self insert by Mrs Clinton. She's almost impossibly astute, fluent in a dozen languages, and utterly flawless in personality.  Despite her perfection and intelligence though, she fails to recognise the villain of the piece when he's stood right next to her and talking to her, even though she once spent two years making a documentary about him...

That's just one plot hole out of many in this badly edited, badly written attempt at literature. When I say badly edited, you can't give a better example than when we get this direct quote from the book  (Pages 360 &361 in my copy)

"The second wave took off, the helicopters filled with precious cargo. The sons and daughters of parents who would be terrified to know what their country was asking of their children. The young men and women clutched M-14 rifles and stared across the aisle at each other.

The young men and women clutched M-14 rifles and stared across the aisle at each other."

Apart from the repetition of an entire sentence, this section shows just one of the thousands of sentence fragments to be found in the book.

Constant use of incomplete sentences for no reason.

Sentences without verbs. Scattered all through the book.  At least 5 to a page. In action sequences, probably twenty per page. And no payout at the end of it. Because of cutaways. 

It becomes very wearing, very quickly. There are several deaths in the book. But all off screen with a cutaway immediately before it happens.

If it was better written I could forgive some of the flaws. If it hadn't promised "the most authentic - and gripping - political thriller I've ever read" on the back cover, I might be willing to accept the scene where she blackmails the Russian leader by photoshopping him into child porn and threatening to release it to the world unless he tells her where the bad guy is hiding, or where she follows the US version of the SAS on a raid into the villain's house, or where she seems to be able to travel halfway around the world in a couple of hours, or any of the other places where it's slightly less realistic than the Tiger who Came to Tea.

But it isn't. 

This is a dreadful book on nearly every level. It's the closest I've come in a long time to not finishing.  The only reason I did was because it's this month's book group read. I forced myself to finish it, and I'm sorry that I did.

The last two pages are the most cliched pile of nonsense in the book.  It's all over, the threats gone... Or is it? Mwa ha ha ha ha.

Don't waste your time with this book. My copy will be going to mulch down somewhere for compost.  I don't see any justification for inflicting this on anyone else. I have no one I hate that much.