Entry tags:

in ur novel eatin ur book, wank

I will never recommend this author to anyone. Evar.
A coworker introduced me to the work of mystery writer Ted Bell today. This did not go well. We spent a good fifteen minutes flipping through the book Spy and boggling at the sheer WTFery of the back ad copy, the prose, the premise, and the dialog. An explosion is searching for a lost river in the Amazon (No, seriously, that's what the back ad copy read), and some guy runs into cannibals who are really Islamic terrorists who are gonna do something awful to the USA as Mexico brings an army across its northern border to take over chunks of the USA, while every person talks like a fucking robot and spends pages telling each other things they should already know, all while the metaphors and similes roll about gnawing on themselves . . .

A single emoticon sums it up: D: Are you fuckin' kidding me?

There are so many things wrong with this book it's unreal. You can even tell by the first chapter up on amazon.com:

He saw painted faces atop long brown legs sprinting madly through the tangled undergrowth along the banks.

This just in: The Amazon basin's hiding a sekrit tribe of daddy longlegs-men!

And for writing something set in the Amazon, Bell's done no research.

A young member of his expedition had been standing in the river, the water just above his knees, urinating. A week later, he died in feverish agony. A candiru had swum up the boy's urine stream and become lodged in his penis. There, feeding on the host's blood, the tiny creature had grown to enormous size. The resulting infection led to the amputation of the organ and the boy's painful death.

So this little fish made a dramatic flying leap up a broken stream of urine, and with its incredible fishy aim managed to go straight up into some kid? Add in the other problems (Brazilians speaking Spanish instead of Portuguese? The guy can't see the sunlight through the jungle canopy but keeps track of the time by the phases of the moon? Nine days to a week?!) and this research junkie cranky editor feels that her intelligence has been insulted--though I'm still somewhat amused by the overly-dramatic outright posturing as Bell himself trolls his review boards. What a fucking loser.


Anyone feeling down about their writing abilities anymore?