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[Dec. 14th, 2007|01:26 am] |
Aw, come on!
You know, there was a point in the middle of Jim Butcher's "Fool Moon" where I was actually enjoying it for a while. I was happy about that.
But the climax is awful.
It begins with young people, standing in the middle of the street, naked. After getting told off for this, they take off their robes, change into werewolves, and step out of the van.
No, you read that right. Naked people remove their clothes and while standing in the middle of the street they exit a vehicle. These are precisely the events described on one page.
In a book that was published. By a large publisher. This is not "somebody missed it", it is not incompetence nor even negligence. An error this obvious is Someone Didn't Give A Shit, somewhere down the line. Usually, in my professional experience, that someone is the person who sets the deadlines for the people who have to do the actual work, insuficient time for them to have the then-luxury of giving a shit. But even then, the writer and the editor should at least be catching things *this* glaring.
The worst thing about a cock-up of this magnitude is that it ruins the flow, it takes the reader out of the book, and casts a harsher light on subsequent stupidities - such as:
- OVERWRITING: "sent screaming pain searing through my body, making me crumple to the ground in agony." That's participle overdose before the comma. Also, if the pain is sufficient to make you crumple to the ground, we *know* you do so in agony. Duh.
- JUST PLAIN BAD WRITING: "Hope lurched in my chest like sudden thunder." Why stop there; why not tell us this sudden thunder happens on a dark and stormy night?
- MIMICKING STUPID THINGS FROM STUPID SOURCES: There's a badass criminal bodyguard who walks around with a pump-action shotgun. When he wants to show how badass he is, he pumps the shotgun. Frankly, I would *love* to go toe-to-toe with this guy, because this criminal bodyguard carries a firearm in which the ammunition is never chambered. I say "never" because this dumbass pump-for-emphasis happens *twice* in the novel. I know it looked really cool when you were 8 and you saw your first Shwarzenegger flick, but come on, use your head.
- WRITING IN THE WRONG MEDIUM: Get this: The situation worsens, the hero quips to end the chapter, and the next chapter begins with another hero quip. Do people really quip twice in a row like that? No, not ever. Not in things that are well-written, at least. But they do it in television all the time. It's practically convention: Quip to cliffhang - commercial - quip to remind viewers about the peril. And it is garbage, every time. (But it seems to have worked, because this novel series is now a television series. And it looks every bit as unintelligent as this scene, which is to say exactly as intelligent as television executives want their audiences to be.) In the first place, pick ONE quip. Be selective. You know, practice the Craft of Writing. You may have heard of that somewhere. Second, if you *must* try too hard to be cool, would it kill you to give one of the two quotes to another character, so the two lines in a row at least make some sort of sense?
- GLARING PLOT HOLE: For most of the novel, our hero has a bullet wound that makes his shoulder flare up with agony when he moves it. But when he turns himself into a werewolf, this injury has no bearing on his ability to fight another werewolf. Why not? Because then the hero would have *lost*. Somebody was hoping I'd be too stupid to notice this. I'm not the stupid one. This hole would have taken a lousy subordinate clause to patch up; there is no excuse for this.
- TROPIC "PLOT DEVELOPMENT": I was irked when our hero was captured and the villains outlined their machinations in front of him, the first time it happened. The second time, I was insulted. The *third* time, Mother Of God! - I wanted to choke the author with a copy of Before I Kill You Mister Bond.
- THEMATIC DEFICIENCY: Someone has no idea what approach to take with the female cop, so the author tries them all, with the results you would expect. Also the text betrays a laughable, White Wolf-esque understanding of human darkness. And it is awfully obliging of the bad guys to preserve our hero's sense of morality by killing each other so he doesn't have to.
- And finally one of my very favourites, CLIMAX-ONSET ANTAGONIST INCOMPETENCE: Werewolf comes upon our heroes all trapped and helpless. But there is one human meal above it and several below, so it takes this natural predator *three minutes* to decide which to eat first, giving our heroes enough time to escape. Three minutes. Earlier in the novel, this creature took out an entire floor of a police station in three minutes, and it had targets in front, in back, and to both sides, but didn't have any trouble picking a target then.
But you know what? In spite of all this, I'll read the next one. Or at least start it. Because it was okay for the most part, and mainly because I want to read something in this genre, and I don't have anything better.
I will say that it earned a belly laugh when a villain, tied up to be a snack with the good guys, sarcastically invited our hero to spend his last breaths saying I Told You So, even though this villain was acutely aware of that fact already.
Oh - and one has to respect that Butcher managed to use *four* different kinds of werewolves.
(Review)
This book is a 5 on 10. Prior to the Van Incident, I was leaning toward 6.5.
BETTER THAN: Supernatural. Which is damning with faint praise, because that show takes stupidity to new and hitherto unexplored realms. Also it only has one character in the first 9 episodes, and she's only in that ninth episode. The rest of them are Lifelike Cardboard Cutouts with Voice Synthesizers taped to them. The main character in "Fool Moon" is well-drawn, and one or two of the others are as well.
NOT AS GOOD AS: The first 4 Tanya Huff "Blood" books (I won't read the 5th), which have better plots and better characters, plus are significantly better-written.
NOT RECOMMENDED: If Wizard Versus Werewolves In An Urban Setting is not what you are in the mood to read, this will not make you more interested in the idea. Also, if you require above-average writing, there is considerable risk this book will bore or frustrate you.
RECOMMENDED: If all you want is Wizard Versus Werewolves In An Urban Setting and your standards aren't too high, you will probably find this book highly entertaining. |
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