It’s only now that I’ve figured out that the author in question is not Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code. Well, I noticed the name, but I only just realized that it wasn’t the person i thought it was.
By the way:
The sequel sucks. Hard.
-FrL-
A friend of mine once said that it’s a stamp of crappiness when the author repeatedly uses both the character’s first and last names (“John Smith pointed the laser rifle straight at the alien’s head. He pulled the trigger. John Smith was not a squeamish man.”).
I’ve found this theory to be mostly true.
In Olympos, Simmons usually calls the main character by his first and last names, title and occupation. I think he even sneaks a middle name in there too at some point.
I like Dan Simmons, even went out of my way to go to a book signing of his. But at the end of Olympos I had no idea what just happened. I liked the characters, but the story was really obtuse. Really obtuse. Really, really, really obtuse.
“Here’s a little tip for you Dr. Crane, it’s called a library card.” Woody from ‘Cheers’.
But someone else will have touched it and gotten their eyeballs all over it! And how is it supposed to sit on your shelf to impress visitors with how smart you are by owning a large pile of books?
Summer of Night wasn’t a stand-alone. It was followed by A Winter Haunting which blatantly ripped off an old Peter Straub book, If You Could See Me Now. Of course, A Winter Haunting’s cover didn’t mention it was a sequel, and I was nearly though it before I found out it was. I never read Summer of Night because the sequel made me so mad. I know the Straub book is somewhat obscure, but A Winter Haunting even lifted characters!
Gah. Summer of Night read like a long-drawn-out pitch for a horror flick – the whole way through it felt like Simmons didn’t care about it as a book, only as a prospective movie deal.
It does. It’s on the back cover. (I bought the book the day it came out - can’t tell you about later editions.)
I do agree with those who think the Illium/Olympos books read like regurgitated Hyperion.