I've said before that reading Neil Gaiman is like having a great big bottle of wine and a whole cheesecake, and that finishing one of his books leaves one feeling lazy, sated, and sometimes a little bloated. That being said, reading Gaiman's Anansi Boys was like realizing the wine bottle you'd just finished chugging was really corn syrup, and your cheesecake was really angelfood cake, and you could really use some fucking meat and potatoes.
So I read some Jim Butcher instead. He's still fun and I still like him, though I reached my saturation point mid-book 5. Yes, everyone wants to kill Harry Dresden. Got that. Maybe I'll go back for more later, but it'll take a bit.
So I picked up the upcoming Guillermo del Toro book, The Strain. You guys know my thoughts on & reactions to vampire fiction--they generally involve me screeching and running in the opposite direction--but I figured, "Hey, it's del Toro. I like his movies . . . It'd be hard for this to go wrong. Right?"
. . .
A silly optimist, I am.
Del Toro, his co-author, or someone in there has definitely done their homework, and if you go into the book wanting to know the how & why of every little detail of Hazmat stuff, bio team reactions, solar eclipses, storing dead people, and so on, you'll be set. If you want the story to get on with it, you're screwed. And if keeping track of fifty different POV characters gets on your nerves, you'd better not pick the book up at all. The writing is simply not good enough to hold up to ten solid pages of people looking at the sky, the dialog doesn't like to stay believable, and the POV-hopping every few pages just becomes tedious.
And if you get pissed off when characters pointedly don't see the cliche wagon? Join me as I run screaming in the other direction. Seriously: a plane full of bloodless dead people lands in New York City (again, always NYC), and amongst the cargo there's a giant unclaimed black box half-full of dirt--and no one goes, "Hey, I've seen this movie before!"
(We have seen this movie, actually. Remember how in Blade II [which was directed by del Toro] the new vampire strain features a super-stabby extend-a-tongue? The stabbity comes from under the tongue in this book's case, but still. Same idea.)
I came away from what I finished of this book feeling like it was trying to be Lovecraft and missing. Lovecraft could make scenery be scary. This? Not so much.
And then there was Harris's latest, Dead and Gone. It's a staggeringly fast read and I'm about 98% certain she's taking stabs at SMeyer left and right, but I could've done without those if she'd . . . well, written a cleaner, better-structured and consistently characterized story. Hell, Viking Eric even stops being fun, and the sex scenes--now with more unnecessary dialog!--have become outright mockable.
Overall, this makes me sadface. :( I'm wondering how it'll affect the rest of the series if I pretend this book doesn't exist.
I get the feeling I'm gonna end up headed into the Literature section really damn soon.
So I read some Jim Butcher instead. He's still fun and I still like him, though I reached my saturation point mid-book 5. Yes, everyone wants to kill Harry Dresden. Got that. Maybe I'll go back for more later, but it'll take a bit.
So I picked up the upcoming Guillermo del Toro book, The Strain. You guys know my thoughts on & reactions to vampire fiction--they generally involve me screeching and running in the opposite direction--but I figured, "Hey, it's del Toro. I like his movies . . . It'd be hard for this to go wrong. Right?"
. . .
A silly optimist, I am.
Del Toro, his co-author, or someone in there has definitely done their homework, and if you go into the book wanting to know the how & why of every little detail of Hazmat stuff, bio team reactions, solar eclipses, storing dead people, and so on, you'll be set. If you want the story to get on with it, you're screwed. And if keeping track of fifty different POV characters gets on your nerves, you'd better not pick the book up at all. The writing is simply not good enough to hold up to ten solid pages of people looking at the sky, the dialog doesn't like to stay believable, and the POV-hopping every few pages just becomes tedious.
And if you get pissed off when characters pointedly don't see the cliche wagon? Join me as I run screaming in the other direction. Seriously: a plane full of bloodless dead people lands in New York City (again, always NYC), and amongst the cargo there's a giant unclaimed black box half-full of dirt--and no one goes, "Hey, I've seen this movie before!"
(We have seen this movie, actually. Remember how in Blade II [which was directed by del Toro] the new vampire strain features a super-stabby extend-a-tongue? The stabbity comes from under the tongue in this book's case, but still. Same idea.)
I came away from what I finished of this book feeling like it was trying to be Lovecraft and missing. Lovecraft could make scenery be scary. This? Not so much.
And then there was Harris's latest, Dead and Gone. It's a staggeringly fast read and I'm about 98% certain she's taking stabs at SMeyer left and right, but I could've done without those if she'd . . . well, written a cleaner, better-structured and consistently characterized story. Hell, Viking Eric even stops being fun, and the sex scenes--now with more unnecessary dialog!--have become outright mockable.
Overall, this makes me sadface. :( I'm wondering how it'll affect the rest of the series if I pretend this book doesn't exist.
I get the feeling I'm gonna end up headed into the Literature section really damn soon.