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By Nico Vreeland, on June 23rd, 2010  Author: Declan Hughes
2010, William Morrow
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
2 |
| Entertainment..... |
2 |
| Depth..... |
1 |
In an early scene in City of Lost Girls, the crew of the movie Nighttown falls all over themselves trying to find an extra who hasn’t been seen in several hours (nearly half a day!). This extra is crucial to the making of the movie, and, if she isn’t found, millions of dollars could be wasted on reshoots. Luckily, private eye Ed Loy is already there, and already working for the director on a different, unrelated matter.
And so, it’s only page 12 and we already know the lay of the land: City of Lost Girls will be a mystery founded on thin logic, absurd coincidences, overstuffed gestures, forced authorial machinations, and plain old unimaginative writing. It only gets worse from here. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 3rd, 2010 [Note: I wrote this review last fall, but I was out of the country, and evidently I never sent it in to HQ. So here it is, more than a little late. If nothing else, let it be a warning not to buy the next book in the Strain series, which comes out this September.]
 Author: Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
William Morrow, 2009
Filed under: Thrillers
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains a piece of information that you can find in the publisher’s description, but that the novel itself doesn’t reveal until nearly halfway though. If you want to read it fresh, skip this review and all others, and any descriptions of the book you might find. Don’t even Google “The Strain.” Just be warned: all that probably isn’t worth the effort.]
Guillermo del Toro is the famous director of Pan’s Labyrinth, among other movies. The style of this book feels appropriate coming from the mind of a director: it’s exhaustive and thorough, and contains a wealth of details about each character’s profession, personal life, and motivation.
For example, the opening sequence, in which a just-landed plane sits mysteriously powered-down and unresponsive on the tarmac, features sections from the points of view of an air traffic controller, a baggage handler, the captain of a fire truck, the head of the CDC’s “Canary” unit, and so on. Here’s an average sentence:
The maintenance crew was using an Arcair slice pack, an exothermic torch favored for disaster work not only because it was highly portable, but because it was also oxygen powered, using no hazardous secondary gases such as acetylene.
At first, this style succeeds in fleshing out the world and the events in it, but it quickly, quickly becomes boring. If this were a movie, somebody on the crew might need to know which slice pack the maintenance crew is using, or what the baggage handler is thinking as she drives up to the dead plane. But the audience does not need to know; even if they did, it would take seconds to communicate onscreen, instead of dozens of long pages. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 10th, 2010  Douglas Preston is, first and foremost, a really bad writer. Normally, that’s the kind of thing I just ignore (there are plenty of them), but in Preston’s case, he’s also ungrateful enough to attack his readers and call them entitled Wal-Mart Americans, simply for wanting slightly cheaper ebooks. Then he pretended to apologize (but didn’t).
In other words, he’s a terrible writer who’s arrogance and contempt for his own fans makes him a perfect target for mockery and ridicule. (Side note: Preston’s writing partner, Lincoln Child, didn’t disparage his own readers, but when you lie down with dogs…)
Preston’s upcoming novel comes out tomorrow so let’s have a little fun with him. Knowing only the cover pictured above at right, and the horrible, cliched title, Fever Dream, five of our contributors guessed the premise of the novel. One of the following is the book’s real premise, the others are scurrilous lies.
1) On his deathbed, Sandford Crow dreams of his father’s lost collection of antique birdcages, each one representing a distinctive moment in 20th century history and in Sanford’s own emotional search for meaning. From his peasant’s education as a naturalist to the collapse of the world’s largest taxidermy empire, this stunning dreamlike narrative follows the rise and fall of the American dream itself.
2) Sammy, a tropical parrot, has fevered and vivid dreams that, one day, … start coming true! When Sammy’s beloved owner appears in his latest dream as the victim of a terror plot, Sammy must race to stop the plot from happening. A challenge with global consequences. Psychic bird. Terrorism. Pulse-pounding action and nonstop suspense. Preston and Child have done it again.
3) An FBI agent discovers that his wife—who he thought had died in the jaws of a ferocious red-maned lion in Zambia—was actually … murdered! He goes to Africa (taking an NYPD cop, cause what the hell) and it turns out she was murdered because of a painting of a bird.
4) Canaries suddenly start mysteriously dying all over town. Is it a mysterious bird plague? Could it mutate and start a crippling pandemic? The female researcher heading the CDC investigation is baffled. Little does she know, her husband has multiple personalities and one is a furry who dresses as Sylvester the cat and kills all the “tweeties” he can find. Too bad he only remembers the truth in his delirious yet lucid dreams…
5) After an explosion traps John and Thom Johnson in the bowels of a West Virginia coal mine, the two must take extraordinary measures to ensure their survival. The situation becomes more complicated when their sentinel, a prized island canary, dies, signaling the presence of toxic gases. As the brothers begin to drift from reality, it will take all their strength not to turn on each other.
6) Terrorists release a supervirus that causes violent hallucinations so severe that an entire village can be wiped out by the murderous fit of a single sufferer. As a retired detective defends his rural home town against suspected sufferers of the disease, he must find out who released the virus and why. The secret is in the birds …
Answer—and who wrote which fakery—coming in the comments.
By Mike Beeman, on April 27th, 2010  Author: Yann Martel
2010, Spiegel & Grau
Filed Under Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
0 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
I feel conflicted about about panning this book. I really didn’t want to. I wanted to love Beatrice and Virgil (although when I heard Martel describe his next project as “a conversation taking place between two animals on a shirt,” I cringed). I did not let the many acerbic reviews it received everywhere stop me from buying the book because I felt that, as a fan of his other work, I owed it to the author and myself to find out first-hand. I loved Life of Pi. I loved Martel’s short story collection,The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, which I bought immediately after reading his Booker Prize winning novel. If you haven’t read either, do yourself a favor and grab them. And if you enjoy them, too, do yourself another favor and stop right there. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 21st, 2010
By Nico Vreeland, on April 21st, 2010  Starting this week, we’re using a new tag, babytown frolics. Basically, it’s the opposite of our Great Reads category. Where the Great Read designation recognizes outstanding literature that the reviewer thinks everyone should read, the babytown frolics tag designates awful literature that the reviewer thinks no one should read.
We’re not trying to pick on authors with this tag. Our contributors pick all their own books to review, nothing is assigned or required. So when a contributor writes a negative review, that reviewer genuinely thought he or she would like the book. Still, we make every effort to be even-handed and objective, and highlight the strengths of a book every bit as much as the weaknesses.
However, when a reviewer uses the babytown frolics tag, that means he or she thinks the book should never have been published. That means something in the book-producing, -marketing, -buying, and -reading process has gone seriously, seriously wrong.
All too often these days, certain publishers care about their bottom line, not just more than the quality of the books they produce, but to the exclusion of quality. A very important role in the publishing world is that of gatekeeper, the entity that keeps utter drivel from reaching the hands of innocent readers. Since publishers don’t seem to want this job anymore, we try to do our part to keep out the drivel. Most of the time we try to use a velvet rope, but sometimes we have to break out the tear gas. “Babytown frolics” is our way of trying to have fun while getting the dirty work done.
Occasionally, we might also drop the tag on an author whose ego and sense of entitlement has outgrown his talent (I’m looking at you, Douglas Preston).
The phrase “babytown frolics” comes from the pilot episode of the very funny animated show, Archer.
By Nico Vreeland, on April 2nd, 2010  "The Girl She Used to Be" is the laziest novel I've read in a long, long time A few weeks ago, I saw this post in the Guardian (same title as this post, here, that you’re reading). The Guardian post was a good-humored response to a silly little thing in the American Book Review which contended that such books as The Great Gatsby and All the Pretty Horses (and even Let the Great World Spin) were among the forty worst books of all time. Their chief criterion for the list was that the bad books on it had to be worthy enemies—by which they meant interesting books that people cared about.
As someone who primarily reads contemporary novels, I see a worthy enemy in the suffocating glut of miserable fiction flooding our bookstores and minds every second of every day.
So I’d like to present my own theory of what makes a bad book bad. It’s quite simple: lazy writing makes bad books bad. (The problems I’m about to outline could also come from a simple lack of talent, but I’ll give bad writers the benefit of the doubt.)
Now, I’m not saying that hard work magically creates great fiction—after all, great fiction is much more than the absence of bad writing—but when it comes to genuine garbage, nothing churns it out better than laziness.
What makes laziness so bad? How, specifically, does laziness impact storytelling? Where does laziness intersect with unbelievability and artifice in a half-assed pentagram of unholy awfulness?
I’m so glad you asked. Let’s find out. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 2nd, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel By An American Author---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
Author: David Cristofano
Grand Central Publishing, 2009
Filed under: Mystery, Romance
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
2 |
| Entertainment..... |
2 |
| Depth..... |
1 |
I’ve seen almost nothing but adoring reviews for The Girl Used to Be. Do not be fooled by them.
Girl is a novel about the Witness Protection Program, and a girl named Melody who feels very sorry for herself because she’s in it. She feels so sorry for herself and so bored that she runs off with the son of the mafia don who had her parents killed. Charitably, that’s a difficult premise to pull off. Uncharitably, Girl is the worst book I’ve read in a long time.
I don’t think anybody should read this book, and all the glowing reviews out there are cause for concern. If you’re thinking of reading Girl, first allow me to lay out exactly why this “eloquent, haunting,” “humorous, poignant, and compelling” novel is actually none of those things.
In fact, it’s not really a mystery or a thriller, either—I’m only filing this review under “Mystery” because Girl‘s up for an Edgar Award. No, friends, this is a romance. And it’s a romance of the very worst kind. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 23rd, 2010  Douglas Preston is a jerk and an author who gets his jollies by viciously insulting his readers, and then continuing to insult them.
I’ve ranted twice about Preston in the past two weeks, and I’ve called him a hack more than once. I wanted to see just how good or bad a writer he is, so I borrowed one of his ebooks (Riptide) from the library. Turns out he’s pretty bad, and I’m going to show you exactly why. This probably won’t be the last time I make fun of Preston, but considering he still hasn’t apologized for insulting his readers (and pretty much all readers of ebooks), he’s got some insults coming his own way.
The point of this isn’t (just) to mock Preston because he’s a hypocritical, self-righteous blowhard who’s trying to exploit his readers instead of appreciating them. It’s also to put the lie to Preston’s comments about how readers don’t want to pay “the real price” for his books. Going by these passages, his readers are, in fact, significantly overpaying.
(This book, and most of Preston’s, are co-written by Lincoln Child, who didn’t insult his own readers. But he did sign off on this insultingly condescending open letter, so he’s guilty of at least aiding and abetting.)
Let’s have some fun.
…
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By Marc Velasquez, on February 9th, 2010  Author: Sarah Palin
HarperCollins, 2009
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoirs
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
3 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
This book was very tough to review. I have to be honest, I’ve started this review several times, and each time—after indulging fitful rants and political diatribes—I’ve had to delete the incoherent blather from my computer’s memory. It’s embarrassing, really, some of the emotions this book has elicited from me. I used to think I stood closer to the center of the political spectrum than to either of its poles. I used to badmouth elitists, and I used to believe that all of their derisive commoner-hating was just a mirror image of the populist movement that made Going Rogue possible. Yes, I used to believe that liberal elitists were just as bad for our collective progress as, say, the Tea Partiers. Then I saw some of the things I wrote, some of the hateful, bilious criticism of both Sarah Palin and her followers, and I realized that I sound like (gasp) an elitist asshole.
Has there ever been a more polarizing political figure than Sarah Palin? Not only do we all have an opinion of her, we all have a very strong opinion. She’s either the best thing to happen to this country, or the worst. So how, then, does one go about reviewing her book—a book that will only further calcify one’s strong opinion of its author?
Going Rogue is shit. It sucks. It is both literarily and politically a steaming pile of moose excrement. …
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Author: Declan Hughes
