I have no idea if the movie version of Cloud Atlas will be any good, but it was worth making just so we could get that excellent trailer. In fact, theI have no idea if the movie version of Cloud Atlas will be any good, but it was worth making just so we could get that excellent trailer. In fact, they probably shouldn’t even release the movie. Just use the trailer to promote the book. It worked on me because once I saw that thing I couldn’t get this read fast enough.
An American notary crosses the Pacific and encounters many unsavory characters in the mid-1800s. In 1931 a young man fleeing his creditors cons his way into the home of a respected composer. A female journalists tries to expose a dangerous conspiracy involving a nuclear reactor back in 1975. In the early 21st century an aging publisher finds himself in hot water after his biggest professional success. The near future has an Asian society based on corporations using genetically modified fabricants as slave labor, and the far future finds a young man in Hawaii living a primitive tribal lifestyle playing tour guide to a woman from a place that still has technology.
These are the six stories that David Mitchell links together. They’re nested one within another and also mirrored in the first and second half of the book. If that’s all that he accomplished here, then it’d just be a really clever way to structure a novel, but it’s the way that Mitchell hit six completely different tones yet uses the same themes in each that the book really shines.
I’m beyond impressed with the way he made each story feel like it’s own separate tale. If someone had told me that this was a book written by six different authors, I would have believed it, and each is intriguing in it’s own right. Themes of slavery and people being controlled in one way or another along with depictions of misused or corrupted power come up again and again, but whether it feels like serious dystopian sci-fi or a beach read thriller, Mitchell makes it all hang together until it really does feel like one epic tale. And the thoughts at the conclusion lead to one of the greatest ending lines I’ve ever read.
I don’t even think I need to see the movie now. ...more
This still holds up remarkably well even if I'm not the zombie enthusiast I used to be. I did the Audible version t*Updated after rereading. 10/12/20*
This still holds up remarkably well even if I'm not the zombie enthusiast I used to be. I did the Audible version this time and the all-star cast does a fantastic job. The weird thing is that the jumping off point for the American political aspect had that 2006 W. Bush era mindset which seemed kind of dark and cynical at the time, but now seems incredibly naïve and quaint these days. The stuff about how various governments around the world either react swiftly or fail completely in a time of crisis really hits home these days.
*Original review.* While his previous book was a tongue-in-cheek zombie survival guide, Brooks turns deadly serious here. Written as a series of survivors' stories in a UN report following a world wide war with the undead, Brooks crafted a classic horror novel that reads like history. Inventive, scary and a must read for anyone who ever enjoyed a George Romero zombie movie....more
One of the most challenging books I've read, and one that I got a lot of satisfaction out finishing. Stephenson's got a wildly inventive mind and readOne of the most challenging books I've read, and one that I got a lot of satisfaction out finishing. Stephenson's got a wildly inventive mind and reading him is like jumping onto a high speed bullet train at full speed.
It took about 70 pages to get used to the new 'language' that he invented for this story, and I had to refer to the glossary repeatedly, but suddenly it just clicked, and I was completly caught up in the world Stephenson created.
Not for casual reading, but fans of sci fi, physics or alternate world plots should give it a try....more
I used to wonder how Phillip K. Dick came up with all the trippy concepts in his stories until I read A Scanner Darkly. That’s when I realized that thI used to wonder how Phillip K. Dick came up with all the trippy concepts in his stories until I read A Scanner Darkly. That’s when I realized that the drugs probably had a lot to do with it.
Originally published in 1977 and set in the mid ‘90s, the book tells the story of Bob Arctor. Arctor appears to be just another burned out druggie who lives with a couple of other dopers, and they spend most of their time getting high on Substance D and assorted other drugs. Bob is actually an undercover narc for the Orange County CA sheriff’s department, and in the future, the cops undercover are in so deep that even their bosses don’t know who they really are. Arctor wears a special scramble suit that blurs his features and voice when reporting to his boss Hank, who also wears a scramble suit to conceal his identity.
Bob has been trying to buy bigger quantities of Substance D from Donna, a spacey hash addict, so that he can work his way to the source, but he’s actually fallen in love with her even though she refuses to sleep with him. He gets a tricky new assignment when Hank orders him to start keeping tabs on a new target; Bob Arctor.
Since he can’t reveal his identity, Arctor has to play out the fiction that he’s investigating himself, but his brains have gotten so slushed from Substance D that he’s having a hard time keeping track of who he actually is.
Bob’s increasing confusion about identity and reality is the kind of theme that Dick specialized in, and Bob’s progressive meltdown is some of my favorite writing he did regarding that. However, while this has a thin veneer of sci-fi over it with the story being set in what was the near future, it‘s actually a chillingly realistic look at drug abuse. Dick spent a couple of years in the early ’70s where he ran with the Just Say Yes! crowd, and this book is a semi-autobiographical account of that time.
Where it really shines is in its portrayal of the drug culture with long sections dedicated to things like an addict who begins seeing bugs everywhere or a botched suicide attempt that turns into a psychedelic eternity of recrimination for past sins. The long rambling conversations with Bob and his fellow druggies are darkly hilarious in that they show a kind of weird creativity while also being completely devoid of logic and apt to go in paranoid directions. For example, a problem with a car eventually leads to their certainty that the cops have planted drugs in the house and that the only solution is to sell the place.
Dick does a masterful job of showing how people could end up living in a perpetual haze while ignoring the long term damage being done even as they see their own friends die or get turned into little more than vegetables by their own behavior. As he puts it, their sin was in wanting to play all the time but the penalty was far harsher than they deserved.
On a side note, I also loved the movie version of this done by Richard Linklater that featured a hand drawn rotoscope process over filmed scenes to give it a feeling of realistic unreality. Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson give great performances as Bob’s druggie housemates, and Keanu Reeves was born to play the brain fried Arctor. ...more
Despite being a big crime/mystery fan, I’m not really into the scores of police procedural novels or dozens of TV shows that litter the networks theseDespite being a big crime/mystery fan, I’m not really into the scores of police procedural novels or dozens of TV shows that litter the networks these days. For me, all of these stories try to portray the various kinds of cops as politically correct robots who go about their jobs with a kind of determined detachment except for maybe the occasional bit of angst to add a little faux drama to the mix.
To get me interested in a cop story these days, it has to be some kind of ultra-realistic look at the bureaucratic nightmare of real police work like The Wire. Or be an epic tragedy with corrupt characters like The Shield. Or have some kind of offbeat protagonist that interests me like Raylan Givens on Justified. But show me those soulless pretty people tracking serial killers by getting their DNA tests done in three minutes on a CSI show and my eyes glaze over.
Joseph Wambaugh worked the LAPD in the 1960s-70s, and during an era when cops were almost invariably portrayed as square jawed heroes, he wrote novels that dared to show the police as very flawed, damaged and relatable human beings. For my money, probably his best work along those lines was The Choirboys.
The book begins with the LAPD brass in an uproar about a potential scandal involving a killing during a ‘choir practice’. As they try to figure out a way to spin the story and minimize the damage, we get the impression that a bunch of police officers went on a drunken rampage and somebody died as a result.
Wambaugh then shifts through the events leading up to the death by following 5 pairs of uniformed police officers working out of LA’s Wilshire division. There’s the tough veteran ‘Spermwhale’ Whalen about to get his 20 years in. Baxter Slate is a former classics student haunted by a disastrous tour working Juveniles. ‘Roscoe’ Rules is a racist moron with knack for taking the most routine calls and turning them into riots. Sam Niles has been stuck with his annoying partner and supposed best friend, Harold, since they were in Vietnam together. Spencer is a clothes horse who works his ‘police discount’ to buy high end retail stuff at wholesale prices. The rest of the so-called choir boys are also a collection of misfits with disastrous personal lives.
The cops engage in what they call choir practice where they go to MacArthur Park with cases of booze they’ve mooched from liquor store owners, and then they proceed to get totally pants-shitting howl-at-the-moon drunk while gang banging a pair of police groupies.
Doesn’t make them sound very appealing, does it?
What Wambaugh shows is that these choir practices are usually the direct result of the horrible things the cops routinely have to deal with while constantly being harassed by their bosses for violations of petty rules while ignoring the emotional well-being of the officers. The worst part of it is that while the choirboys are routinely abused while dealing with parade of ignorant lowlifes and see the worst that people can do to themselves and each other, it’s all so achingly common place that they can’t muster more than slight contempt and dark humor. Until they see something so horrible that they call for a choir practice to block it out with booze and meaningless sex.
The intellectual Baxter puts Wambaugh’s theme into words while giving a drunken lecture during a choir practice:
I mean that the weakness of the human race is stupefying and that it’s not the capacity for evil which astounds young policemen like you and me. Rather it’s the mind boggling worthlessness of human beings. There’s not enough dignity in mankind for evil and that’s the most terrifying thing a policeman learns.”
What keeps this book from being just a depressing look into the abyss is that it’s black cop humor is constant. There’s almost nothing that happens that can’t be made into sick humor and there’s no asshole boss so irritating that he can’t be the victim of an ingenious prank for revenge. It’s crude and socially unacceptable, but it’s really damn funny, too.
Rereading this in 2011, I could only imagine the howls of outrage if something like the choirboys became a media scandal. A gang of drunken cops abusing their badges to score free liquor for binge drinking and pulling trains on a couple of cocktail waitresses in a public park would get a whole lot of people fired these days, but the great thing about Wambaugh is the way he convinces you that that the choirboys were usually good cops deserving of respect and sympathy....more
This book is a military style space opera with …..Wait! Where are you going? Get back here. I hadn’t got to the good part yet. Give me a second to expThis book is a military style space opera with …..Wait! Where are you going? Get back here. I hadn’t got to the good part yet. Give me a second to explain. Geez…
OK, so yes, there is an interstellar war with human troops in high-tech armored suits battling an alien enemy on distant planets. I know it sounds like another version of Starship Troopers or countless other bad genre sci-fi tales that copied it, but this one is different. Hell, when it was published in 1975 it won the Hugo, the Locus and the Nebula awards for best novel so you know it’s gotta be pretty decent.
William Mandella has been drafted as one of the first troops that will be sent to fight the Taurans. There are points in space called collapsers that are like wormholes that will transport your ship to a distant area in the universe instantly, and humanity is fighting the Taurans to use them. Both races like to build bases on nearby planets to establish control of the area around the collapsers.
Unfortunately, most of the planets out there aren’t anything like what we’re used to seeing in Star Wars. They’re usually cold lifeless rocks, and just training to use their suits in these environments is dangerous, let alone trying to fight an alien race they know little about. Mandella gets through training and manages to survive the first battle with the Taurans.
That’s where the book gets really interesting.
While the collapsers provide instant space travel, the ships still have to get to the nearest one and that means months of travel at near light-speed. It turns out that Einstein was right about relativity and traveling at near the speed of light makes time do some funky things. So while the troops on the ship feel like a journey only took months, years have passed for everyone else. When Mandella returns to Earth after his first battle, he’s only aged two years, but ten years have passed on Earth.
Since Mandella has to do more and more light speed journeys, centuries pass on Earth even though it’s only been a few years for him. Mandella will return from missions to find that humanity has changed so much that he has almost nothing in common with the rest of the people, and since he manages to survive several campaigns when almost everyone else dies, he’s quickly becoming one of the oldest men in the universe during his ten year (subjective) enlistment.
Another quirk of the time differences is that when the humans meet the Taurans, they can’t know if they’re battling alien troops who are centuries ahead or behind them in terms of military intelligence and weapons technology. So Mandella and his fellow soldiers may have a huge advantage or be severely outgunned. It just depends on if the Taurans they’re fighting started their light-speed journeys before or after they did.
As the war drags on for century after century, it is both sustaining and draining Earth’s economy. Mandella finds himself losing all his family, his friends and his lovers to war or age. He is increasingly out of touch with Earth and the rest of humanity. The army continues to promote him, mainly because his seniority has reached ridiculous levels after centuries of service.
One of the things that isolates Mandella is that homosexuality becomes the norm due to Earth overpopulation. In an ironic reversal of don’t ask-don’t tell, Mandella is the outcast that disgusts many of his fellow soldiers due to his unenlightened ways. Even the slang spoken by other soldiers becomes incomprehensible to him. Increasingly lonely and out of sync with everyone around him with almost no chance of surviving his enlistment, Mandella nurses the hope that the war will someday end during the large gaps of time he skips as he travels to his assignments.
Joe Haldeman is a Vietnam vet, and this is an obvious allegory for that war with a weary soldier stuck in a seemingly endless conflict and realizing that even if he makes it home, he won’t fit in to the world he left. While Haldeman’s science and military background gives the book its detail and depth, it’s the tragedy of Mandella’s predicament that makes it a sci-fi classic. ...more
My copy of this was a paperback that I had picked up somewhere in my high school years. It was printed in the ‘50s and cost 60 cents per the cover priMy copy of this was a paperback that I had picked up somewhere in my high school years. It was printed in the ‘50s and cost 60 cents per the cover price. The pages were yellowed and an old dog of mine (dead 20 years now) chewed on a corner of it at one point, and his teeth marks are still on it. But I held onto that copy over the years through multiple changes of residence and numerous paperback dumps to used book stores and library donations. When I was trying to organize some of my stuff packed away in the basement, I found my battered old copy and felt the immediate need to read it again.
But I also decided to invest in a better edition. Frankly, I was scared the old one would fall apart, but I’ve carefully packed away that copy again. I’m thinking about putting it in my will that I should be buried with it. That gives you an idea of how highly I regard this book.
My new copy says on the cover that it’s the greatest war novel of all time. I’m not going to argue about that statement. I’ve often thought that this book should be required reading for any politician with the power to declare war. Only a madman or Dick Cheney could send troops into combat after reading this.
Paul is a 19 year old German soldier in World War I. Living though artillery shellings, gas attacks, trench warfare and seeing a generation of men blown to bits has made Paul old before his time. He has a soldier’s profound weariness and cynicism. Some of the more heartbreaking parts of this are when Paul and his fellow soldiers realize that they’ve been changed far too much to ever care about anything but survival again. Paul and the other soldiers try to find small comforts where they can since there’s almost no chance they’ll survive the war unscathed.
On the very short list of books that I think everyone should read at least once.
Trivial Side Note or No, I Don’t Work for the Kansas City Tourism Board
The National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial is something I recommend to anybody who likes this book, or has any interest at all in these types of things. (My wife is usually not interested in war stories or memorabilia at all, but she found this museum fascinating.) It’s got tons of actual equipment from the war, interactive multi-media displays, and some truly eye-opening exhibits.
For example, there’s one room you walk into that is a recreation of what it looked like when a large shell hit a French farm house from the basement perspective. So you walk in and it feels like you’re in a giant crater with house debris above you. There are also recreations of the trenches and one battlefield set done below a wide screen documentary playing that gives a vivid and eerie feeling of what a hellish landscape was created by the war.
Wanted: Middle management for the oversight of an assembly line in an industrial paper factory. College degree and experience a must. Homicidal maniacWanted: Middle management for the oversight of an assembly line in an industrial paper factory. College degree and experience a must. Homicidal maniacs welcome to apply.
Burke Devore was a typical middle-aged guy with a steady job, a wife and two college aged kids. However, when he gets laid off, he spends two years looking for new employment and realizes that there are far too many people with more education and experience looking for similar work.
After Burke reads an article in a trade journal about a factory doing the kind of work he specialized in along with an interview of a manager there, he realizes that it’s exactly the kind of job he’s suited for. Broke and desperate, Burke comes up with a unique solution. He’ll kill the manager and apply for his job. But with so many unemployed in his industry, there’s bound to be a better candidate. So Burke places a phony ad in a trade journal, collects the resumes of the people who would apply for the job, selects the ones who would be the most competition and sets out to eliminate the six people he’s identified. Burke knows it will take a terrible toll on him, but he’s determined to get that job.
The late Donald Westlake wrote this in 1997, but his publishers really missed an opportunity during the last economic bust to reissue this book with great fanfare because it’s even more poignant now.
I’ve noted before that I’m amazed at how Westlake was always able to shift gears between his comic writing in books like his Dortmunder series and the hard boiled Parker crime novels he wrote as Richard Stark. This is another facet of his writing. The concept seems almost darkly funny at first, and this could have been played for black humor easily.
But Westlake wrote a taunt and tragic tale of an ordinary guy committing horrific crimes, and he makes the point that it’s more than just economics driving Burke. His identity is wrapped up in his job, and he has come to conclusion that he’s acting in self-defense to preserve himself and his family. I also liked how Westlake portrayed Burke going through various kinds of emotions related to his murders. Sometimes he’s overwhelmed with guilt. Sometimes he gets incredibly angry at the people in his way. Sometimes he has nothing but contempt for his victims for not being as willing as he is to do what it takes.
The whole book is pretty chilling, and Burke comes across as a character that you’ll both sympathize with and fear. ...more
When we meet Parker, we don’t know much about him. He’s just a guy with shabby clothes and a bad attitude walking across the George Washington Bridge When we meet Parker, we don’t know much about him. He’s just a guy with shabby clothes and a bad attitude walking across the George Washington Bridge into New York without a dime to his name. Within hours of arriving in Manhattan, Parker has used an early ’60s form of identity theft to fill his wallet and set himself up quite nicely. Clearly, this is a resourceful guy. As we quickly learn in The Hunter, he’s also a guy that you do not want to double-cross.
A professional thief, Parker was betrayed, robbed and left for dead by one of his partners, Mal Resnick, who turned Parker’s wife against him. Mal used the money he took from Parker to pay off a debt he owed to the Outfit, and now he’s got good connections to the mob in New York. Parker doesn’t care who got the money or who Mal knows, he just wants to satisfy his grudges.
It’d been a while since I’d read any of the early Parker novels, and I was a little worried about how they’d hold up. Thankfully, they‘ve aged with style. With Parker, we’d get the prototype to the anti-hero professional thief, and there are countless fictional characters that owe a debt to him.
Since this initial book has Parker seeking revenge for a very personal double-cross, he’s more angry than he’d be for most of the series, but he’d always have that blunt and no-nonsense nature. On some levels, Parker seems completely amoral, but he’s a ruthless pragmatist, not a psychopath. He doesn't hurt anyone unless it's necessary, but if he needs to kill someone to get away with the loot, he doesn't hesitate for a second.
I read somewhere once that when asked why he used the Richard Stark pen name for these novels, that Westlake replied that he wrote his funny comic capers as himself on sunny days but that on rainy days he wrote as Stark. Fortunately for crime fans, Westlake must have had a lot of rainy days.
And a big Thank You to the University of Chicago press for reprinting the hard-to-find early Parker books in these gorgeous trade paperbacks. ...more
An operative from the Continental Detective Agency is summoned to Personville (a/k/a Poisonville) by a crusading newspaper publisher, but the man is mAn operative from the Continental Detective Agency is summoned to Personville (a/k/a Poisonville) by a crusading newspaper publisher, but the man is murdered before the Continental Op can meet with him. The Op quickly learns that Poisonville has a crime problem that would make Gotham City seem like Topeka by comparison. After getting a look at its seedy underbelly the Op browbeats the dead publisher’s wealthy father into paying him to clean up the town even though he’s a big part of the problem.
The Op starts working angles, playing criminals and crooked cops and every corrupt person he runs across against each other. Bodies start dropping and warfare between various factions looms as everyone is looking to move up the food chain. The Op exploits this in every way he can, but the increasing carnage starts to take a toll on him as he fears that he’s becoming as bad as the people he’s up against:
“This damned burg’s getting to me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood simple like the natives.”
Hammett was obviously doing something over the top here with a town where murder is seen as the first and best solution to almost every problem. While it’s got that pulpy kind of story, Hammett was also drawing on his experience as a former Pinkerton agent to paint in some of the details and give it just enough gritty reality to make it seem plausible. The plot he cooks up about a tough guy trying to bring down a corrupt town by playing sides against each other was hugely influential in crime fiction and in the movies.* There’s also a line you have to admire on just about every page.
I don’t think this quite measure up to The Maltese Falcon, but this violent tale about one man trying to clean out a corrupt city earns it’s reputation as one of the best of the genre for a reason.
When it comes to Scott B. Smith it’s a good thing we got the quality because the quantity is on the low side with only The Ruins released since this oWhen it comes to Scott B. Smith it’s a good thing we got the quality because the quantity is on the low side with only The Ruins released since this one came out in 1993.
Hank Mitchell is a regular guy living in rural Ohio with his pregnant wife Sarah and a steady job as an accountant at a feed store. He isn’t close to his brother Jacob who is a high school dropout that spends most of his time drunk when not scrounging out a living. One of the few times they interact is their regular New Year’s Eve visit to the graves of their parents. While taking care of this annual obligation they’re going to drop off Jacob’s drinking buddy Lou before heading to the cemetery when a freak accident leads the three men to the discovery of a small plane that has crashed in the snowy woods. Along with a dead pilot they find a bag with over four million dollars in it.
Hank’s first instinct is to turn in the money to the cops, but Lou and Jacob want to keep it. Tempted but worried that the two men will do something stupid to draw attention to them, Hank will only agree if he holds the cash until the plane is eventually discovered once the snow melts. If no one is looking for the money after the plane is found, they’ll split it up and go their separate ways.
Anybody think this is going to end well?
This is one of my favorite crime novels and a prime example of what I consider to be noir. What starts as the kind of decision that many (Most?) people would make is the first step towards suspicion and betrayal that finds Hank constantly reevaluating his relationship with his estranged brother. That’s about all I want to reveal to anyone who hasn’t read it, but if you like dark stories about the lengths seemingly ordinary people will go to when they see a chance to change their lives, give this one a try.
It was also turned into a very good movie adaptation with Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton that has significant plot differences that make it a surprising watch even if you’ve read the book.
A few more thoughts for those who have read it. (view spoiler)[
• This and No Country For Old Men make the point that if you find a bag of money and want to keep it that you should never never never go back to the place where you found it.
• I’ve always thought it was effectively creepy how the pregnant Sarah becomes Hank’s Lady Macbeth, but they make the amateur criminal mistake of being just a little too cute with their crimes. Sarah’s idea of returning some money to the plane is clever, but returning to it causes the first murder. Killing Sonny as part of the stage setting for the murders of Lou and Nancy was completely unnecessary. The cops would have no trouble believing that a guy like Lou could shotgun his girlfriend in a drunken rage for any trivial reason. Trying to make it look like Sonny and Nancy were having an affair was an unnecessary risk that could have easily backfired.
• Speaking of that shotgun murder spree, I’ve read this three or four times, but I just realized that Smith made some critical errors with Hank's actions that should have got him caught. First, Hank called Sarah after Lou and Nancy were dead, and she comes up with the plan about involving Sonny. The story is that they dropped off Lou and were leaving when they heard the shooting. If the cops pulled the phone records (Which seems likely at the house of a quadruple murder.) they’d see that call to Sarah and have a good idea that Hank was lying. Also, gunshot residue tests that would be routinely administered in a situation like that would show that Lou hadn’t fired a gun but that Hank had been emptying a shotgun.
• I’d forgotten the part about Jacob’s dog. Hank really shows that he’s kind of an uncaring son-of-a-bitch under this regular fella persona when he leaves the poor animal alone in a garage nights and ties it to a tree during the day where it has nothing to do but sit in the cold and mud. He never considers that it’s not Jacob’s death but his own treatment that makes the dog mean, or of trying to find another home for it. The way he botched the shooting of it is also the most painful scene in the book for me. Yeah, I’m one of those people who can read about or watch a thousand people getting brutally murdered without batting an eye, but even fictional cruelty to animals makes me sick. (hide spoiler)]...more
Scott Smith’s wrote one of my favorite crime novels with A Simple Plan that released in 1993. Thirteen years later came his second book, The Ruins whiScott Smith’s wrote one of my favorite crime novels with A Simple Plan that released in 1993. Thirteen years later came his second book, The Ruins which instantly became one of my favorite horror novels. I’ve got my fingers crossed that sometime later this decade he’ll write another one and maybe it’ll turn out to be the greatest sci-fi epic I’ve ever read.
The concept here is dirt simple. Idiots go somewhere they shouldn’t and bad shit happens. In this particular case four American college students, two boy-girl couples, are on vacation in Mexico where they meet several other tourists from all over the world. A German named Mathis tells them that his brother got smitten with a woman and followed her to an archaeological dig in the jungle, and that he needs to retrieve him before their flight home. The Americans and another Greek fellow decide to join him and set out on an impromptu adventure following a hand drawn map to a remote location.
A bunch of unprepared and ill-equipped tourists wander off into the jungle? What could possibly go wrong?
After they find themselves trapped on a hilltop by something that defies belief the young people endure thirst, hunger and injuries and have to consider extreme actions in order to survive.
The sub-title of this book could almost be A Series of Bad Decisions, and that’s one of the aspects that made it unique for me. A lot of horror is based around punishing people for their actions. Frankenstein gets his monster for daring to try to change the natural order. Jason slaughters teenagers for acting like teenagers. In The Ruins there is no single moment of arrogance or failure of character to point out as the thing that bring about the situation. (Although there are plenty of small examples of rotten behavior that make it that much worse.) Rather it’s just the sunny optimism that everything will be OK that puts these kids in a leaky canoe headed up that fabled Shit Creek with no paddles.
Smith does a great job of playing off the human nature of being in a bad spot and wondering how you got there only to have the sickening realization that you knew for a while that you heading into trouble, but you somehow talked yourself into staying the course it with the assumption that everything would work itself out.
The characters themselves are a departure from what you get in most horror novels these days. Yeah, I know some people hated them, and they truly are a pack of insufferable dumb asses for a large part of the book. But I think what some readers really didn’t like about them was that they did act the way most of us would in those circumstances. For example, Jeff tries to play the hero, and while you can empathize with his frustrations with the others he’s also being a complete douche bag for not acknowledging the bigger picture. The others also act with varying amounts of denial and panic.
What’s interesting is that there are no easy answers as to how they should be behaving. (Serious spoilers here.) (view spoiler)[Jeff’s insistence on amputating Pablo’s legs and trying to convince the others to eat the corpse of another illustrates that you can make a bad situation worse by trying to do the right thing. On the other hand, sitting around and drinking tequila is criminally irresponsible on the part of Amy, Eric and Stacy. (hide spoiler)] So there’s this uncomfortable push-pull between the traditional concept of doing every single desperate thing you can think of to survive versus realizing that you’re fucked and just giving up. That’s the grey zone where this book operates and part of what I found so compelling about it.
I’ve seen some complaints about the nature of the threat, and I’m not sure if that’s still considered a spoiler or not so I’m throwing it under a tag. However, I’m only discussing what they’re facing while not giving up any plot details. (view spoiler)[ OK, so it’s a plant, and I get why some are skeptical of the concept. The mystery probably didn't help that when it first came out because some people were expecting a chupacabra or jungle cannibals or something along those lines so that when the reveal came, the first reaction was “They’re fighting a fucking plant?” I remember being surprised and wary the first time I read this, and the stuff about it being an intelligent and mimicking sounds did strike me as far-fetched. But is it really any more fantastic than vampires, zombies, werewolves or Texas chainsaw massacres? In the end, the insidious nature of the vines became another major plus of the book for me. (hide spoiler)]
So this one retains its high spot among my personal rankings after reading it a second time. It’s not your typical horror tale, and it’s a gruesome story that shows people behaving poorly in dire circumstances which makes it an uncomfortable read at times. But isn’t that the point?...more
Loading...
