A. Human Being

Solid

Reviewed: 06-05-24

Stephen King has been one of my favorite authors my entire life. No other author has ever made me read hours past when I said I'd stop reading because I felt I needed to know what was going to happen next. I've enjoyed some of his late life writing a great deal and I put Duma Key right up there as one of my most favorite books.

This was not among my favorite King books. The man has every right to slow down, if not stop entirely. I appreciate these books more than his collaborations, which (for me) simply don't seem to work except with Peter Straub. Those books were greats- the stories were actually better than had one or the other have written them alone. This book sometimes felt like torturing character who had already been hit hard in earlier works. Sometimes I just felt... squirmy. I don't know how else to name it. I understand that squirmy is what passes for the slow build-up of terror in the best horror books these days, but it doesn't feel right in a King book. That's just me. Honestly, this book felt exactly like a King's agent received a call from whatever publisher he's signed with and was told they didn't care if King published the thoughts he had while shaving in the morning and had some AaI bot transcribe, but at least one book needed to be put out there because people (even readers) have the attention spans of gnats these days. So some employees went through the dozens and dozens of boxes of all kinds of writing that a writer. with a work ethic like King must produce over the course of a career. "People love that stuff now- they all want to see how the sausage is made" so stories that might not have ever been published get tossed into a book and everyone makes more money because capitalism is a hungry beast that must be fed. I don't know how I feel about this- would I rather have this stuff reliably or a great book every 3 or 4 years? And how does a man who has built his entire life around a work ethic that has ensured that generations of King's descendants will have secure futures turn that faucet off? I don't know. A new King book will never make me unhappy, but this wasn't a book that left me especially satisfied. I will still pre-order the next book (unless it's a collaboration with Chizmar-sorry, I just don't want to give any more of my life to that awful story (which many loved, which just goes to show that authors should write what they love and not read reader reviews, lol).

I don't resent the hours of my life I gave to this book and I truly enjoyed some of the stories- the answer man I'd have loved to read more about. Honestly, saying that this book wasn't my favorite King is a little silly- it's still far and away better than most horror writers ever write.

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5 people found this helpful

Your mileage may vary

Reviewed: 12-14-23

This was an impulse buy. I didn't care for the book, but based on the reviews, many folks have loved it. Go for it if it sounds interesting, but...

Essentially, the entire book is built upon a single idea and then a rather slow paced and uninteresting conflict ensues between two parties who both want exclusive use of the new technology (with a tech billionaire thrown in for a bit). One side is good and the other bad, of course. The bad characters are even the ones you'd expect- lawyers and a tech billionaire who abuses women. Not a single character is fleshed out. It literally feels like cardboard cutouts interact with each other for much of the book. Maybe some folks will enjoy this book- I know hard scifi fans who are fine with wooden characters and awkward sentences as long as the science is right and there's a lot of action and clever verbal exchanges. Well, there's not a lot of action or clever verbal exchanges and I have no clue if the science is plausible but I do know that I need a decent story and characters I am at least interested inenougj to wonder what will happen to them or what they'll do and this book had neither. Finishing this book was a real slog for me.

The narrator was professional and his reading wasn't bothersome in any way. I suspect, however, that he didn't find the book all that interesting, either.

Your experience may vary, however. The book has many good reviews. Fortunately, Audible allows you to return books (if you haven't read all of it, of course) so it's as risk free as these things get. I do hope you enjoy the book.

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Ouch.

Reviewed: 11-17-23

I have pre-ordered ALL of Butcher's books since I read the first Dresden Files book. I cannot recall reading one of his books and wondering how much more I can take before this one. It's like a high school author's first book if that author wanted to write a romance novel set on pirate ships. It's also a mash up of fantasy and (very sort of) sci fi. At the same time, it has the feel of a Renaissance Festival with cheesy overperformance, humor, and "we're all in on the joke except for those people over there, but someone has to buy wildly overpriced turkey drumsticks". None of the various elements feels organic and they fit together with an awkwardness that makes me feel uncomfortably like I did when a good friend in high school asked me to read a book she'd been working on for years and it was really, REALLY terrible.

I have always enjoyed Jim Butcher, but as hard as I try to get into this book it feels like someone who read all of his books but has MUCH LESS skill wrote this. My apologies, but this simply is not a good book. It's very obviousf that, if he actually wrote this, his heart just wasn't in this book. I'm hanging in there for more talking cat scenes- cats are woefully underutilized as characters in fiction writing. If they can't carry the story any better than the characters who are so forgettable that I cannot recall a single one at the moment, I am going to have to abandon ship.

I'll 100% still pre-order Butcher's next book. I held out through some pretty terrible Stephen King books, too. People go through rough patches and writers are people, too. They get better, sometimes.

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4 people found this helpful

Negative Reviews Should Be Viewed W/ Skepticism

Reviewed: 09-13-23

TL;dr- relax, detach yourself from your politics and personal values, and enjoy the story. King is being King and wrote the character as she IS, not as readers wish her to be. Not one of King's best books, but certainly not one you'll finish and wish you could get the hours of your life you spent listening to it back. If you absolutely cannot stand an OCD person being OCD, then you probably don't like Holly Gibney anyway and you should pass on this book because it's mostly Holly being Holly.

All the carrying on about King including his politics in his books makes it abundantly clear that most folks haven't read King extensively. I have read every book he has published under his own name and Richard Bachman and folks, it's nothing new. Why people get so upset about it is amazing--- Holly Gibney is OCD and her mother just died from Covid. If she WASN'T concerned about people's vaccination status, masks, etc - that would be unbelievable. Rule following is very important for people with OCD (whether their own rules or those perceived as social norms, laws, etc). That is part of why living around someone who is OCD can range from annoying to nerve wracking. As someone who had Covid and went from a very healthy, active 51 year old to being someone with heart and kidney failure, pulmonary hypertension, severe neuropathy (from the top of my head to the tips of my toes), and now hypersensitive to seemingly everything, I have a great deal of sympathy with her. And my husband is a Respiratory Therapist who worked a number of severe Covid waves in hospitals so full of severely ill patients that he had seen absolutely nothing like it in 30+ years of professional experience. He's still receiving treatment for PTSD from nights of doing so many chest compressions during CPR that his arms hurt so much he had difficulty sleeping (and he's been a body builder for almost 50 years). He still has nightmares from which he wakes up weeping and cannot be consoled, only held until the episode passes. The human mind cannot witness that much suffering and death without being grievously wounded. He went through hell wesring a respirator for 16 hour shifts while people whined about wearing a mask when they ran into a store for a few minutes - and took assault rifles into our state house of representatives because their right to infect others with Covid was being violated. So yes, I have some sympathy for King's position and it would have been frankly stupid to have set the story during the pandemic and have Holly behave any other way.

That said, I found some of the writing of racist characters to be clunky and not well written. It certainly could have been done better, but King is very nearly retired- actually wished to be retired, but either could not because as Barbara says, the pus must be drained, or his fan base refused to accept his retirement. (He has spent some notable time counseling younger writers who are having difficulty coping with the negative aspects of fame, including fans who hound their favorite authors for books while also expecting regular engagement across a wide range of social media platforms, interviews, readings, and other appearances. The transition from "writer" to "author" is extremely painful and the process has ruined a good many careers.)

Not having listened to the other books and this not having comparison interfering with my enjoyment, I was fine with the narrator. She was in the top 3rd of the hundreds of audio books I've listened to, certainly not as bad as some have stated.

Few are probably reading at this point anyway, but there is discussion of the story that if you haven't finished the book yet, you might want to stop here...

The story wasn't King's finest. I've read that Holly Gibney is one of King's favorite characters and it shows in this book, which is very heavily focused on Holly with other characters seeming to function at the very edges of the book- aside from the killers. I could have done with killer's who were more fleshed out, but King hasn't done a lot of that in his Mr Mercedes series and other books with characters from that series. I prefer his more... supernatural... bad guys. Those in this book are just unusually elderly and intellectual psychopaths, but pretty much garden variety psychopaths otherwise.

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Fantastic acting, mediocre writing

Reviewed: 02-26-23

WARNING: contains spoilers) I find it astonishing that James Patterson wrote this. The writing is not exactly bad, but it isn't exactly good either. The lead character finds himself lost in method acting a serial killer so he proceeds to murder people all over LA without the slightest hint of caution regarding being caught or apparently having any moral values himself.

Really?

Patterson can write much, much better than this.

As far as the actors, they're flawless. Not only Quinto, but the entire cast. The story did move along and as long as you don't think about it too much, it's a decent story that makes good escapist fiction if that's what the reader is seeking. There is significant foreshadowing, but the reader is beaten over the head with it until it loses all value. I have not finished it and I'm unsure if I will. There are so many fantastic books out there that it's unnecessary these days to read bad ones.

I feel bad for having bagged on this story. It's certainly good escapist fiction if you have no literary critic in your mind. Unfortunately, I do.

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Good read, great listen 🎶

Reviewed: 01-07-23

Just a fun story, nothing heavy or requiring your complete and total attention, so perfect for listening to while gardening, jogging, or the like. As always, the narrator was phenomenal and made this very good story a great listen. It was free with membership, but I would have paid for it. Well worth the time.

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An Unexpected Delight

Reviewed: 12-27-22

For some reason, I've never read Kingsolver. I had the vague idea that she wrote romances or something. I don't remember why I bought this book, but I am so glad I did. It's been a while since I found myself thinking about characters when I wasn't reading, but I was very engaged with them. This isn't a book that sugarcoats poverty or addiction- it's just as ugly as it truly is, but the narrator is an individual of exceptional love and kindness and Kingsolver presents every action and situation in their real complexities. There aren't a lot of writers who create characters of such depth- and present the majority of their characters, even those who make fairly brief appearances, as fully fleshed out individuals the reader really cares about.

And the narrator! I have more than a hundred Audible books and many are very well done, but I have never heard a narrator's voice so perfectly fitted to what I imagined the character's voice to sound like. What a pleasure it was to listen to! I wholeheartedly give this book 5 stars and recommend it without reservations.

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Amazing how far we've come

Reviewed: 12-08-22

I devoured every book Anne Rice wrote as soon as they were published. At the time, I absolutely adored the books. Listening to them now, I still enjoy them very much. the over the top description doesn't bother me a bit- I feel as though I'm in New Orleans, feeling the humid heat on my skin and smelling the profusion of flowers that grow in great abundance. The city seems to both demand and require that kind of writing. What drove me mad to the point of yelling at whatever device I was listening on was character motivation.

If you haven't read the book, you may want to skip the rest of this review.

Rowan wasn't a character I liked, but some of the things Rice had her do were nearly inexplicable. I am open to a character's complex sexuality but the scenes with Lasher and Rowan were just over the top. These days anything seems to go, but this story has absolutely everything except for dismemberment (although apparently Rice felt that was acceptable too as long as the results were kept as science experiments). The ending, however was simply stupid. A physician with a fortune who expected to have a baby with a man she loved beyond words ends up with her infant hijacked by a possibly psychopathic but very definitely violent, manipulative, and very possibly evil being who forces the baby's cells to replicate unnaturally quickly so what was a newborn sized child becomes a 6'2" tall, weirdly thin adult sized being who then attempts to kill her husband and she thinks, "sure thing, I will take off for parts unknown with this being WHO RAPED ME AND STOLE MY BABY". That gave me whiplash. all I could do was scream "why!?!?!" so loudly that my elderly and very deaf beagle startled awake and was befuddled to find me yelling at my phone at midnight.

I don't remember being upset by this book when I read- and re read multiple times- it when it was published initially. Perhaps we've become much more refined readers over the intervening years. Never forget that we have Anne Rice to thank for it. She broke the ground which the writers of today garden with so much creativity and skill. But the character development and progression in this book is still maddening!

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The Narrator is Nerve Wracking

Reviewed: 08-01-22

Although I am not finished with this book- and I hope I make it through because it's not a bad story- I have to complain about the narrator, who is actually TOO good at acting out some of the characters and their internal emotional states. I don't know how many more near panic anxiety states I can go through or how many more earnest college students screaming at the world their thoughts and theories. I listen while I do things- garden, clean, etc. I don't always have the ability to drop what I'm doing to turn the volume down suddenly because another character is screaming, no matter how positive and happy the characters are. The worst are the character's super anxious states- I feel like I need a Xanax or something just seconds into what can last several minutes. Narrator should get an award for her acting- she really is very good. I just don't need THAT much excitement in my life.

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1 person found this helpful

Sounds like John Wayne

Reviewed: 07-08-22

Story is average- not inspired, not especially exciting. Butcher as a narrator is as expected- authors rarely perform well as narrators. As Dresden, he sounds like John Wayne. Other characters were terrible to totally ridiculous. I say as a long time fan of Butcher's work that this isn't his best work, but it's only 3 hours long.

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