Books

Well, as I read new stuff, I thought I might as well put down what doesn't work, too!  But with comments, because to each his/her own!  Perhaps my sour is your sweet!

Not Recommended Authors:

• Barker, Clive. Horror fans, prepare yourselves.  Barker is not King nor Shelley, not even a Lovecraft.  It never ceases to amaze me how a writer who can sometimes assemble some fine images and even fine fantasy (Weaveworld is an example) can so stretch the limits of human discomfort.  What is most horrifying about Barker's works (He is the author of the original Hellraiser, for instance, and my recently completed Coldheart Canyon) is not the story or conflict (though there is a disharmony to the plotting, an unsatisfying randomness to the events), but the twistings of nature he wreaks upon his characters and scenes. The stories are often conventionally or even formulaically plotted, but the objects in them are more often gratuitously repulsive, meant more to offend a reader than to compel us to suspense or terror.  Not for the weak of heart or stomach, nor for the reader looking for a satisfying read.

• Card, Orson Scott.  Empire.  I generally love Card's work, but this was an incomparable bomb at several levels.  While Card pretends to be even-handed, his far-fetched plot of a liberal coup to overthrow the US government is on the one hand harmlessly obscene, but at worst is incendiary.  Yes, liberals seemingly sell plans to Al Qaeda in order to assassinate the President; then--from their underground mountain hideout--they release high tech robots to invade New York.  Card's idea of emotion is to have his characters all "say/said" without variation.  His idea of style is to spell out the idiotically obvious: "He tied the rope under his arms. That way, if the river's current was too difficult to swim, his friend could pull him to shore."  His idea of a scintillating plot twist is to shoot his main character in the eye and kill him without warning.  Ooh!  Card supposes that the US will move from Republic to Empire much like Rome and so creates a progressive Princeton professor who manipulates his students into a civil war.  But in case you're worried about understanding it all, the main soldier-heroes will preach and speech in the middle of the action; if that is not enough, Card's own Afterword will spell it out again.  If you want to make sense of the far-fetched holes in the plot, you are out of luck.  It's been awhile since I've read something so awful that I grew angry at both its content and craft simultaneously.

• Koontz, Dean.  I know I'm in a minority here, but as popular as Koontz is as a horror writer, that popularity is directly balanced by bad prose and worse plotting.  His horror novels follow a clear formula: create a quiet and inoffensive protagonist with a disability and pair him with a psychic dog who together battle government-created monsters (like genetically-enhanced killer monkeys). Rational explanations for the government conspiracies are absent. But even in his suspense novels, like The Good Guy, he masterfully pairs empty plotting with absurd prose. His metaphors, often praised for originalty, are only creative in their absurdity and mood-spoiling. Imagine this one as he tries to create a mood of harmlessness: "The mild May night breathed as shallowly as an anesthetized patient waiting for the surgeon."  He describes his enormous protagonist as a "mayfly skating upon the pond." Nevertheless, as our hero is stalked by a psycho killer (hired by a secret government branch who can be "anyone we want to be"), his innocent mason job begins to sheer away and we find he, too, has a secret past which makes him a heroic match for the villain. What is the secret?  He foreshadows: "Sooner or later, the part of yourself you try to keep down, it won't be kept down any longer. It's in the blood, and blood will have its way, I guess."  Even his own mother (of course a hostage) suggests her son is special. Okay, appropriately suspenseful, but as the pages turn and he polishes off the villain by shooting him when he's down (with the help of his friend), we find out the secret: he was in a war and saved some guys pinned by enemy fire. That's it. When the jacket of the book offers you a snippet of a scene to whet the appetite, but then the scene actually occurs in the last 30 pages, even the editors know something is wrong. By the way, the hero is saved not by his own cunning at all, but by the "loyalty" of the secret-government agents (who hired the assassin) to our protagonist's record as a war hero: they change their mind about killing him, though they killed a dozen or so along the way to reach him. I think maybe I just hate thrillers.

• Ludlum, Robert.  Well, if Ludlum has made a lot of money (and he has!), it must be from the sheer number of trite and clichéd expressions. Such texts as his 2006 Ambler Warning are predictable and even painful: a secret agent cannot remember who he is or his secret mission.  How many rip-offs of the Bourne Identity can one create--and wait, he wrote that, too!  Every criminal has a "grip of steel" and his heroes are "masterful," an authorial judgment made in case you didn't already know. Give me a break. While his straightforward action passages are tolerable (It's hard to mess up a sentence like, "Ambler raised his elbow and punched it into the chin of his assailant."), they are hardly inspirational. More, entire sections of narrative are inexplicably deleted: we will learn the detailed composition of a knife case in one scene while missing an explanation of how his hero escapes an onslaught of gunfire to break into a four-wheeler two hundred yards away and escape.  Ludlum seems to have no control over his narrator's role (or even that he's aware that his narrator should have one): the narrator oscillates between omniscient and objective, between a character and a non-entity, between a pedantic teacher and a critic of the action.  I might recommend Ludlum for a light read, but the prose was so offensive, I am happy to report that I have absolutely no idea what Ambler's secret is--I refused to finish it!