This is going to be one of those pain in the ass books to review because you can’t really talk about it without spoiling it, and the things that reallThis is going to be one of those pain in the ass books to review because you can’t really talk about it without spoiling it, and the things that really need to be discussed all happen later in the plot. Yet there’s so much wrong that I really want to get into all of it. It’s quite a dilemma.
Here’s what I can safely tell you: Rachel Childs’ mother refused to tell her who her father is which leads to a troubled childhood and rebellious teenage years. After her mother’s death Rachel follows up on various clues as she finishes school and becomes a rising star in TV journalism. While reporting in a disaster zone she experiences some terrible events that lead to the derailment of her career and crippling panic attacks that leave her a shut-in almost completely unable to deal with the world outside her apartment. Then some other things happen…
This really seems like two different books. The opening sentence tells us immediately that Rachel is headed for big trouble, but then it jumps way back to her childhood. We spend a lot of time with her growing up and being obsessed with tracking down her long lost father. This goes on for so long that it fools you into thinking that the book is more of a character drama/romance type of thing instead of a straight-up mystery/thriller, and I was actually enjoying this part.
After the turn we know is coming happens it seems like we’re in the territory of a Lifetime movie, but the book still had its head above water at this point. That’s when this plot which had been looking like a psychological suspense thriller turns into something else completely which stretches the suspension of disbelief way past the manufacturer’s recommended limits, and it shatters completely.
I yelled "Oh, bullshit!" so many times during this second part that I sounded like someone walking across a cow pasture wearing his best shoes. (view spoiler)[ Probably the biggest sin here is the idea that there’s not just one but two utterly batshit things that we’re asked to believe. I could have bought into the idea that Brian was a con man who had been working this elaborate long term scheme. If I squint hard enough I’d even go with the idea that with this much planning a couple of grifters would be capable of setting up fake passports and safe houses even though that seems a lot more like spies than con men. But the idea that Brian sets up the whole elaborate thing of having Rachel follow clues to the point where she’ll ‘kill’ him, and then fake his own death solely as a shock treatment to cure her panic attacks is a bridge too far as well as just goddamn ridiculous. Especially in the context that he’s doing this as he’s also trying to steal $70 million dollars from some very bad people. Even the screenwriters of The Game would have rejected this as being too implausible. (hide spoiler)]
I’m a huge fan of Dennis Lehane so this is really disappointing. Now I know how a teacher feels when their favorite student hands in a rotten paper, and they have to give it an F. I suspect that a lot of readers will find the first half boring and pointless compared to the second half, or like me, they'll be more intrigued by the character based first part and think the rest is complete nonsense.
Lehane just got way too cute for his own good here as well as not seeming to have a good handle on what kind of book he was doing. While the writing itself is solid and Rachel is a pretty decent character it’s like he tried to make a peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich, and the results taste about as good as that sounds.
Any untagged spoilers in the comments will be deleted....more
I received a free copy of this for review from the author.
**I'm reposting the review because this is now being published as a Kindle e-book on May 1, I received a free copy of this for review from the author.
**I'm reposting the review because this is now being published as a Kindle e-book on May 1, and it's only $2.99 if you pre-order.**
In a dystopian near future a handsome young man named Rhodes has a lucrative illegal business as a Husk which means that he essentially rents out his body to rich people No, not like that, you perverts. These are dead rich people…OK, now I'm gonna have to ask you to leave because that’s just sick. Go on. Close the door on your way out.
Where were we? Right, so the deal is that the richest people have found a way to cheat death and download their consciousness into computers, but playing Halo and trolling on Twitter gets boring after a while so they can rent a Husk and have a human body for a few days. Rhodes enjoys the money plus it’s a lot better than being one of the millions of suckers who can’t earn a living at a regular job, but his clients seem to be increasingly less concerned with damaging the merchandise. (You know how nobody really cares what happens to a rental car they’re driving? Same principle.) Plus, he’s started having weird flashes to things that aren’t his memories.
Most of the book is essentially a sci-fi conspiracy thriller, and it functions pretty well as that. I was a little let down that it didn’t do a bit more contemplation about identity and its relation to the physical body. However, Messum does a lot in the first person narrative that has Rhodes becomingly increasingly aware that while he thought he was just renting out his physical self that he might have been peddling something far more precious so essentially it becomes an extended metaphor on prostitution. So we do get some deeper themes on the idea that you can’t entirely separate the body from the mind.
The third act seemed like it was in jeopardy of turning into a pretty standard action and revelation style plot, but it swung back around to deliver some genuine surprise at the end. Overall, even though some elements are familiar it ends up being an entertaining story with enough meat on the bone to give your brain something to chew on....more
Don’t you hate it when you’re hoping for great and get merely pretty good instead?
I was really excited about this going in. Lawrence Block edited a coDon’t you hate it when you’re hoping for great and get merely pretty good instead?
I was really excited about this going in. Lawrence Block edited a collection of short stories in which each one was based on an Edward Hopper painting, and the writers include some of my favorites like Stephen King, Megan Abbott, and Joe Lansdale as well as many other publishing heavyweights. What’s not to like?
Sadly, this is one where the concept was better than the execution. Block’s introduction certainly got my hopes up, and I completely agreed with his idea that each Hopper painting seems to invite the viewer to create a story for it. The results ranged from straight crime and spy tales to more character based Lit-A-Chur. There’s nothing I actively disliked or found terrible in any of them, but none of the stories really blew my hair back. In fact, it sometimes seemed like the writers were really trying too hard to be clever to fit the premise.
It’s no great shock that the best story Block’s since the whole thing was his idea, and what he came up with seems the most effortless that still feels like a Block story even as it fits his painting perfectly. (And I’ll make a special note to any King fans out there that if you’re getting this just for his story you’re gonna be disappointed because while his is OK it’s also very short.)
It’s not a bad collection, and it’s certainly an interesting theme. As much as I wanted to love this I kept finding other things to do rather than pick it up, and it took me a couple of weeks to finally get through even though it’s less than 300 pages so it never really hooked me completely....more
This is yet another story that confirms my firm belief that nothing good ever happens on a boat. The movies and TV alone provide an endless list of reThis is yet another story that confirms my firm belief that nothing good ever happens on a boat. The movies and TV alone provide an endless list of real and fictional disasters like Jaws, The Poseidon Adventure, Titanic, A Perfect Storm, All Is Lost, Dead Calm, Captain Phillips, that episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where the gang buys a boat and Dennis makes a chilling explanation of the ‘implications’ when sailing with a lady, that other episode of Sunny when the gang goes on a cruise and everything goes horribly wrong.... Damn. I didn’t realize Sunny had two episodes about boats…Maybe three if you count the time that Frank hijacks the tourist boat to get to the movies…
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Boats. You can keep ‘em.
But some people actually are foolish enough to leave land. Like Kelly and Dean, a couple who have spent a year going around the world on their sailboat Freefall in an effort to save their marriage. Their relationship is on the mend as they’re cruising near Antarctica when they hear a frantic radio call from someone in trouble, and the signal is quickly jammed. They try to find the source of the transmission but have no luck. As they head to South America the radar tells them that a ship is following them, and it’s getting closer.
I’ve become a big fan of Jonathan Moore lately thanks to the excellent trilogy he wrote in which each book had its own particular style. The Poison Artist was moody psychological suspense, The Dark Room had a whodunit mystery vibe, and The Night Market was a near-future sci-fi conspiracy thriller. In the tight 200 pages of Close Reach Moore shows that he can do yet another genre that is equal parts survival-at-sea and horror.
It’s a terrifying story that works in large part due to the detail work Moore put in to make even a landlubber like me understand how the boat functions and what being on your own in a remote part of the ocean is really like. The tension ramps up to nail biting levels as Kelly and Dean try to fight their way through an on-coming storm while the mysterious boat gains on them.
I don’t want to spoil the twists and turns of the story, but suffice it say that when the confrontation comes a whole ugly level of hell is unleashed. Fair warning that this is a dark and brutal story that has blunt and graphic descriptions of all kinds of harm that people can inflict on one another. It made me wince and squirm at several points, but Moore’s skill and pacing keep it from sinking down to the level of torture porn.
The frank nature of the violence isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you’re up for it then you’ll get a fantastically gruesome tale that’ll make you practically taste the salt of the cold ocean spraying across your face....more
Star Trek just turned fifty, and since I’m a fan only a few years younger than it I’ve soaked up enough of its history and trivia over my lifetime to Star Trek just turned fifty, and since I’m a fan only a few years younger than it I’ve soaked up enough of its history and trivia over my lifetime to qualify as a bridge officer on the USS Nerdlinger. Yet this book opened my eyes to all kinds of things about the show including debunking several myths I’ve taken as Trek gospel.
It starts off as kind of your standard behind-the-scenes story of how a pilot turned cop turned TV writer/producer named Gene Roddenberry came up with the idea for a sci-fi show, and then it describes the often painful process by which it eventually was brought to life by a dedicated cast and crew. That’s a fascinating story in itself, but by going through the production documents like script drafts, shooting schedules, and memos as well as drawing on personal recollections of those involved Marc Cushman also provides what becomes almost a daily diary of the initial creation and filming of each episode.
So we get a big picture view of things like how the television industry worked at the time so that the executives of Desilu Productions had good cause to think that shows like Star Trek and Mission Impossible might bankrupt the studio, and how Lucille Ball had to repeatedly step in to override her own board to keep them from being scrapped. We also drill down to the level of noting exactly who wrote each draft of a script and what changes were made as well as personal stories for all the guest stars and crew as well as the major figures like Roddenberry, Shatner, and Nimoy.
What emerges from all of the this is an intriguing picture of the controlled chaos that the production of the show frequently was. It also provides a lot of facts that contradict the general wisdom we usually hear about the original series. The story I always heard was that the show was low-rated at the time, cheaply done, and that the broadcast network NBC frowned on it’s progressive social messages and attitudes. In fact, the show had very respectable ratings in its first season against stiff competition from other networks, it was one of the most expensive made at the time, and NBC was actually encouraging things like diverse casting.
So why does nerd lore tell us something else? It was probably a variety of misconceptions and myths that grew up for a variety of reasons. Networks didn’t release ratings back in those days, and in fact might not want the producers of a show to know exactly how popular it was to prevent them from asking for more money. The show often looked cheap and slapped together because the technical demands had them constantly over budget and behind schedule. As for why NBC was often painted as a villain you could probably say that's due to Gene Roddenberry's habit of blaming NBC when he had to make an unpopular decision.
In fact, while Roddenberry certainly deserves a huge share of the credit for creating the show his behavior frequently caused issues that probably hurt it and helped lead to its cancellation after three seasons. His style of dealing with freelance writers and insisting on unpaid revisions which he would then rewrite himself rubbed many the wrong way, and he routinely pissed off NBC. Roddenberry would then spin these disagreements as examples of the network pushing back against his social messages when the reasons might be directly due to his more selfish motives. For example, Majel Barrett was cast as the first officer in the original pilot, and the story I’d always heard was that the network didn’t think a woman should have such an important role and made Roddenberry change it in the second version. In reality NBC balked at Majel Barrett because she was Roddenberry’s mistress at the time so it seemed like bad business, and it’s hard to fault them for thinking that.
At the same time we learn how the show was hiring people like Gene Coon, a veteran writer/producer who stepped in at a critical time and showed an amazingly quick ability to to write his own scripts and revise the problematic work of others. Dorothy Fontana was an aspiring screenwriter who initially took secretarial jobs to get her foot in the door of the industry which she first used to sell scripts to TV westerns as D.C. Fontana. Eventually she became Gene Roddenberry’s secretary, then a freelance writer for him, and finally took on the position of story editor which made her one of the most important Trek creators.
The only problem is that sitting down and reading about all these episodes in a row gets a little repetitive. The production of the show fell into a rhythm that the book captures, and that starts to feel monotonous after a while although there’s always plenty of amusing anecdotes like how they got an actor to be in the rubber suit of the lizard-like Gorn creature by calling the guy in at the last minute without telling him what he’d be playing.
So as a straight up reading experience it can get a little tedious after a while although I think any TOS fan would like the initial stories about the show’s creation and find it a great reference when revisiting individual episodes....more
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