My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Bookshelves: abandoned, post-apocalyptic, horror, supernatural, monsters-and-such
This book isn’t quite getting me there. But I didn’t set out purposely to read it, don’t feel like I was drawn in by false hype, so there’s room for forgiveness. My husband found it abandoned on a depot bench while he was waiting for my train and grabbed it for me because I love books. I’ve found some good books in bus seats and the like – a tattered copy of the I Ching comes to mind – but this one was a bust.
It started out well, even if it was a very Stephen King-ish mashup of The Stand and Firestarter and The Dead Zone, even it was very trope-ish with the magical child, the father-figure-protector, the psychic black holy woman. I was enjoying it. Then about a third of the way in – bam, that world is gone and we’re rocketed forward a hundred years or so, leaving behind the well-drawn characters struggling through the military-virus-fuckup-apocalypse to build a new world. WTF? I liked those characters. I wanted to see where they went, how they pulled it all off. And I could have kept with it and even put up with vampires from anyone other than Anne Rice, if the new setting and the new characters had been as compelling, but they weren’t. The new characters are numerous yet two-dimensional, and the pacing is bogged down. I put the book aside after an evening’s reading and never cared enough to pick it up again. (To be fair, I had an Elmore Leonard novel on deck and it’s tough to compete with the Duke.)
Which is not to say that Justin Cronin is utterly unskilled as a writer, because he’s not. He can create a realistic setting, can turn an evocative phrase. Other people loved this book. Perhaps I’d like one of his non-genre novels.
I will leave this on another metro bus, that it may continue its journey and hopefully find its way to someone who can appreciate it.
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99 Monkeys 