I enjoy reading the “mystery thriller” genre. Those are the type of books where there’s what seems like a simple murder, but really it’s part of a plot by (The Soviets/Arab terrorists/rogue elements in our government) to bring down the US, and only the maverick (CIA agent/FBI agent/military officer/Secret Service agent), with the help of the beautiful, young, brilliant (lawyer, FBI agent/government analyst/journalist ) can stop them.
Anyway, a few days ago, I got a new book, called “Executive Actions” by Gary Grossman. The plot is really good, and it could be a really good book. But the writing is just terrible. Here’s an example, formatting as it is in the book, from a scene where Scott Roarke, our hero, is picked up at the airport by a friend:
This would be a good book if it was written by Robert Ludlum or Brian Haig or something, but this guy really needs to get a better editor, because he can’t write.
Has anyone else out there read something that could have been good, but…
“Wrestled his neck”? I can’t even figure out what that means.
Anyway, there’s a book I once started reading … what was it … oh yeah. Picoverse by Robert A. Metzger. It sounded interesting from the back cover blurb, so I bought it and started reading it. The third paragraph on the first page made me laugh out loud:
“… the oil-on-water lenses of her Virtuals reflect[ed] the morning light. Sunrise was spectacular, the sun hanging behind the Bank of America tower, the light cutting into the building, refracting through stained glass windows, then erupting from the building’s western face in rainbow streamers that played out across the city. Clouds, tinted bloodred, hung low on the distant horizon, while the air, full of springtime pine and grass pollen, glowed golden. It was a perfect morning. But Katie saw none of it.”
Damn it, man! Why the hell did you just waste my time reading a paragraph that sounds like the descriptive writing exercises we used to do in 8th grade if the viewpoint character isn’t even seeing it?!
I don’t know how great Robert Metzger’s story was, because his writing was so irritating that I quit reading after the first chapter. (Maybe if somebody here really thinks he’s a great author, I’ll give it another shot.)
I’m probably gonna catch some flack for this but I’d have to say Catch-22. I love WWII novels, and I love satire even more – I really enjoyed Slaughterhouse Five and Confederacy of Dunces, for example. But I’ve tried to read Catch-22 on at least 3 different occasions, and I can never get more than 50 or so pages into it. I realize it’s supposed to be insightful social commentary, but aside from a few chuckles, it just seems tedious and repetitive to me, and I can’t maintain enough interest in the plot or characters to keep reading.
One of these days I’ll try again, because I know it’s a classic and I feel like a dumbass for not being able to stumble through it…
I had the same problem with that book. I read further than you did, but it was clear he was not going to give the theme its due.
Metzger is an interesting idea man (he has a column in the SFWA Bulletin talking about new scientific discoveries worthy of SF stores, and the writing there is pretty entertaining), but hasn’t seemed to develop into a novelist.
I saw something similar in Paul Levinson’s The Silk Code. It was his first novel after a series of exellent short stories, using the main character of those stories, Phil D’Amato. And the opening section with D’Amato is very good, and the premise is fascinating, but then he goes into a long, extended flashback – over half the book – that is tedious beyond belief.
Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H. F. Saint has a good premise, but a hero that is such an utter moron that I tossed the book aside with great force.
In the same vein as The Da Vinci Code, I remember reading Digital Fortress and thinking, “You know, great premise and all, but if you took the Mary-Sue main female lead out and focused on her husband instead, you might have a half-decent thriller…”
The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Not a complete disappointment, as it’s a decent enough novel in its own right. But when you kick-start your story with a hugely mysterious event full of paranormal and religious overtones, I will expect you to develop those concepts in the rest of the book. Leaving some loose ends hanging at the end of the book is one thing, but you can’t start something which appears to be the story’s primary plot element, and then just drop it and barely even mention it again.
Now, we have a book which starts out as fantasy, or at least magical realism, but ends as a fairly standard psych thriller with a murder or two, which is rather unsatisfying. Said paranormal event, which initially holds so much promise of introducing the reader to a whole new world full of interesting goings-on, turns out to be just a McGuffin which could easily have been replaced by a drunk-driving accident or something. Too bad, because I really would have liked to learn more about those interesting goings-on.
In A Conspiracy of Paper, David Liss has an interesting subject – banking and the beginnings of the stock market in England, the currency switch from solid coin to bank notes, and the scandal of the South Sea Company “bubble”.
Murders are committed to hide shady business dealings.
Liss info-dumps, and his main character, who is investigating the crimes, is too dumb to live. In one scene, he entices a housemaid to let him into a banker’s house so that he can search for a suspicious piece of paper on the guy’s desk. He and his accomplice walk around the room talking to each other. Not whispering – talking – while the banker sleeps upstairs.
He visits the various people he suspects of being involved in the murders, tells them his suspicions and asks them questions he knows they won’t answer.
You should submit that to Sticks and Stones, commenting on absurdly written excerpts from actual books. It’s part of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a yearly contest for intentionally bad hypothetical first sentences of books, named for an actual author whose book Paul Clifford starts with a horrible sentence beginning with the now-famous line “It was a dark and stormy night” (later plagarized by Snoopy for his horribly written novel).
As for books which didn’t live up to their potential, I nominate Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss. It’s the story of a man who is collecting information about classic video games for his own personal amusement. One game in particular, the titular Lucky Wander Boy, is his obsession, because of its obscurity. He is searching for information about it, specifically what happens at the end. In a twist of fate, he finds himself working for a Hollywood production company which owns the movie rights to the game. The first part of the book is very interesting, and is captivating in its’ hero’s interest in videogames (The chapter titled “The Microsurgeon Winner: A Dead Grandma Story” stands on its own as a good short story, and is possibly one of the best things ever written about how people find their own meaning in video games), and the satire of the wacky Hollywood production company (especially the cliched script for the Lucky Wander Boy movie) is very funny. However, as the book progresses, it becomes less interesting and increasingly more bizzare. There’s one subplot involving a personal video-game-related quest that is never resolved, and an unusual recurring reference to a (fictional) Chinese book about a woman who is sentenced to death by having each part of her body chopped off one by one. Much like the game itself, the first part of Lucky Wander Boy is the best.