Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places was a much more ambitious, daring, and expansive than was her debut, Sharp Objects. In her second novel, the author takes the themes of the first—family, entitlement, privilege, patriarchy, and healing—flips them into their opposites—poverty, desperation, fear, and hopelessness—and examines the relationships between them, specifically the self-sustaining cycle they maintain. In this novel, Flynn also solidifies her status as a master at crafting small town and rural American life; she proved that Sharp Objects was no fluke.
Dark Places goes back and forth between Kansas City in 2009 and rural Kansas in January 1985. The 2009 chapters are told in a first-person point of view by Libby Day, who was seven years old when her mother and sisters were murdered in 1985. The earlier year’s chapters follow Libby’s mother and brother, Ben, who was convicted of the murder charges, from a third-person view as they live the 24 hours prior to the murders.
Libby escaped death by hiding in her mother’s closet and then escaping out of the window. Hiding out in the woods all night made her a victim of frostbite. When we meet her, she’s missing three toes and half a finger. 2009 Libby is a friendless loner. She lacks social skills and interaction. She lives a life you’d find unsurprising of someone who is the only surviving witness to the slaughter of her family. Up to the novel’s opening, her life was financed by well-wishers who donated to a fund for her. As the funds run out, Libby is forced to discover some other way to sustain herself. That desperation leads her to members of a Kill Club, people obsessed with famous killings. No one in the club believes Ben was actually responsible. Libby’s testimony is what put him away, which means the club members are not fans of her. She needs money, though, and she’ll put up with them long enough to make some money investigating the case for them. The heart of Dark Places is Libby’s journey of discovery.
I got into Libby and her mother right away. I think it took a few chapters for Flynn to feel comfortable with Ben’s voice. She never fully captured it, in my opinion, but she came close enough to do a credible job and say what she wanted to say.
The dichotomy between Ben’s and his mother’s growing desperation and hopelessness as they traverse through that fateful day is one of the more brilliant aspects of the novel. As each navigates his/her day, they commit actions that inadvertently, yet directly, affect the other. As Libby, who never examined or paid any attention to any aspect of the case after Ben’s conviction, begins the process of trying to piece things together, we readers learn how much everything—in life, not the story—is connected. To what do we expose our children? How much do we underestimate them? How often do we push them to lie under the guise of telling the truth? It doesn’t just point out the world’s problems, though; it also tries to get at the roots. How did we get here? What’s keeping us here? What are we afraid of?
What I consider to be the book’s biggest flaw is that, in my opinion, Chapters 33 and 40 were unnecessary. Readers should have been able to figure out all that was revealed in those chapters without their inclusion. Flynn had given us all the necessary clues.
One thing that I love about Dark Places is that no guns were left on the table, even those that seem like throwaways. This was the near flawless execution of a thoroughly conceived plan. When all is said and done, this may be remembered as Gillian Flynn’s masterpiece.
What I loved most was Libby. She was tough and brave, but not too much of anything. She was a survivor, but a believable one. Along with Mira Grant’s Georgia Mason and John Irving’s Ruth Cole, Libby Day is one of my three favorite female protagonists. Great character.
A
Monday, May 27, 2013
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Terms of Enlistment
Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos
I quit at the 24% mark. Not a lot had happened up through that point. The protagonist, Andrew, went through basic training and received his assignment. Prior to enlisting, he lived in a Boston area Public Residence Cluster, which seems to be a futuristic version of the projects. Other than that, it’s just an expository dump of military life in 2108 North America. There is no sense of what actual life is like, what the government is up to, or who the enemy is. There’s just nothing…except things that don’t quite add up.
The first 24% of this book is filled with contradictions. The biggest is that the narrator speaks and thinks like a highly educated person, not someone who grew up in an area where nothingness persists, which is how life in the Public Residence Cluster is described.
Overall, there was no semblance of a story forming by the time I quit. And the voicing is all wrong. The protagonist doesn’t feel like an actual person. I should have quit at eh 4% mark, when I read this: “I spend my final night in PRC Boston-7 reading the last fifty pages of Moby Dick. Tomorrow, I will have to leave the book reader behind. I’ve read the novel a dozen times or more, but I don’t want to leave it unfinished now, forever bookmarked at the spot where the Pequod slips beneath the waves.” Moby Dick? That’s a sign of a bad book.
The final straw, the passage that made me put it down for good was this: “Jackson is an equally tall and thin black girl. She wears interesting tattoos under her eyes, some sort of tribal pattern.” Good day, man.
D
I quit at the 24% mark. Not a lot had happened up through that point. The protagonist, Andrew, went through basic training and received his assignment. Prior to enlisting, he lived in a Boston area Public Residence Cluster, which seems to be a futuristic version of the projects. Other than that, it’s just an expository dump of military life in 2108 North America. There is no sense of what actual life is like, what the government is up to, or who the enemy is. There’s just nothing…except things that don’t quite add up.
The first 24% of this book is filled with contradictions. The biggest is that the narrator speaks and thinks like a highly educated person, not someone who grew up in an area where nothingness persists, which is how life in the Public Residence Cluster is described.
Overall, there was no semblance of a story forming by the time I quit. And the voicing is all wrong. The protagonist doesn’t feel like an actual person. I should have quit at eh 4% mark, when I read this: “I spend my final night in PRC Boston-7 reading the last fifty pages of Moby Dick. Tomorrow, I will have to leave the book reader behind. I’ve read the novel a dozen times or more, but I don’t want to leave it unfinished now, forever bookmarked at the spot where the Pequod slips beneath the waves.” Moby Dick? That’s a sign of a bad book.
The final straw, the passage that made me put it down for good was this: “Jackson is an equally tall and thin black girl. She wears interesting tattoos under her eyes, some sort of tribal pattern.” Good day, man.
D
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Sharp Objects
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
No good fiction is actually about the plot. A horrifying tale about family, entitlement, privilege, patriarchy, and healing, Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects is no different. The plot involves the investigation of child abductions and murders. I felt many things while reading this book. “Good” was not one of them. This was a novel that twists and turns you, churns your stomach, and makes you feel sick inside—all while being beautifully written.
I used phrases like “lacked continuity”, and “logistical nightmare” to describe the previous book I read, so, clearly, Sharp Objects is a bit of a rebound for me; still, Flynn’s prose sucked me in from the very beginning. This was a beautifully written novel with details that provide a perfect picture of the setting, history, people, and circumstance. During much of my reading time, I was in Wind Gap, Missouri, and not lying on my bed staring at my Kindle. Flynn’s writing captured me.
Certainly, Sharp Objects is not for everyone. The protagonist, Camille, is a cutter. She has carved words all over her body with, well, you know the title. Both her sexual history and sexual present are disturbing, yet, unfortunately, not uncommon.
Camille’s mother, Adora, is the worst mother I’ve ever come across in fiction. Compared to Adora, Joan Crawford is Claire Huxtable. The star, though, is Camille’s half-sister, Amma. A “Hit Me Baby One More Time”-era Britney Spears crossed with the little boy from the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone. Only 13 years old, Amma runs Wind Gap. She’s precocious, beautiful, brilliant, and pure evil.
When Camille, a newspaper reporter in Chicago, returns home for the first time in eight years to investigate a child abduction, she realizes that everyone in town is afraid of Adora and Amma. Trying to help solve an abduction, which turns into a pair of murders, Camille is forced to confront all of her hurts, all of her weaknesses. And she can’t seem to stay away from Adora and Amma’s bad sides.
I loved Sharp Objects. I’ll probably read it again. I can’t wait to read the rest of Flynn’s work.
A-
No good fiction is actually about the plot. A horrifying tale about family, entitlement, privilege, patriarchy, and healing, Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects is no different. The plot involves the investigation of child abductions and murders. I felt many things while reading this book. “Good” was not one of them. This was a novel that twists and turns you, churns your stomach, and makes you feel sick inside—all while being beautifully written.
I used phrases like “lacked continuity”, and “logistical nightmare” to describe the previous book I read, so, clearly, Sharp Objects is a bit of a rebound for me; still, Flynn’s prose sucked me in from the very beginning. This was a beautifully written novel with details that provide a perfect picture of the setting, history, people, and circumstance. During much of my reading time, I was in Wind Gap, Missouri, and not lying on my bed staring at my Kindle. Flynn’s writing captured me.
Certainly, Sharp Objects is not for everyone. The protagonist, Camille, is a cutter. She has carved words all over her body with, well, you know the title. Both her sexual history and sexual present are disturbing, yet, unfortunately, not uncommon.
Camille’s mother, Adora, is the worst mother I’ve ever come across in fiction. Compared to Adora, Joan Crawford is Claire Huxtable. The star, though, is Camille’s half-sister, Amma. A “Hit Me Baby One More Time”-era Britney Spears crossed with the little boy from the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone. Only 13 years old, Amma runs Wind Gap. She’s precocious, beautiful, brilliant, and pure evil.
When Camille, a newspaper reporter in Chicago, returns home for the first time in eight years to investigate a child abduction, she realizes that everyone in town is afraid of Adora and Amma. Trying to help solve an abduction, which turns into a pair of murders, Camille is forced to confront all of her hurts, all of her weaknesses. And she can’t seem to stay away from Adora and Amma’s bad sides.
I loved Sharp Objects. I’ll probably read it again. I can’t wait to read the rest of Flynn’s work.
A-
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Extinction Point
Extinction Point by Paul Antony Jones
NOTE: Whenever passages from the book are quoted, all emphases are mine.
This review is full of spoilers. I can’t even begin to describe how incomplete, how uninspiring, how nothing this book was without spoiling it. Besides, you really don’t want to read it. Trust me on this.
I read Extinction Point because my wife downloaded a free sample on her Kindle, read it, and thought the book might be something we’d enjoy reading together. Boy, was she wrong. That I promised to read the book to completion is the only reason that I didn’t dump it a third of the way through it. Yes, Extinction Point was that bad, bad enough to stand as the single worst post-apocalyptic book I’ve ever read. It offended me on an intellectual level.
The idea, the concept behind the novel, was something that could be worked and developed into something great, but my overall impression is that Extinction Point was not well thought out. The execution and details were major failures.
Before I discuss them, let me give you a brief overview of the book: Emily Baxter is a reporter for New York City daily newspaper. Emily grew up on a farm in Iowa, did not leave the state until she was in her twenties, and yet, never learned how to drive. As the novel opens, she lives in Manhattan on the seventeenth floor of a higher end apartment building. One day, a mysterious red rain falls on Europe and then, hours later, the United States. Within eight hours after the fall of the red rain, seemingly all animal life dies except Emily. A couple of days later, Emily posts her cell phone number on every social media site she can think of. A day or so later, she receives a phone call from a research center in Alaska where a team—supposedly; we never hear from or of anyone other than a man named Jacob—of scientists survived. They suggest Emily come to them.
Much of Extinction Point’s many problems are caused by the author’s use of language. The novel read to me as a collection of words that the author thought might sound pretty together. Sadly, many of his words and phrases failed to make any sense when put into context. “His face turning as white as the blood-splattered sheet of paper he still clutched in his free hand” makes no sense. My absolute favorite:
Many of the protagonist’s thought processes failed to make any sense. Everyone around Emily is dead, but when she saw a body under a blanket on the sidewalk, she calls out to it and runs up to it with the full expectation that it’s a living person who’s sleeping on the street. Why would she expect this man to be alive? If he was alive, why, considering that everyone else is dead, would he still be sleeping on the street.
That’s but one example of Emily proving to be the dumbest ELE survivor in literary history. There are scores of others. She was worried about drinking tap water after everyone died, but she was comfortable taking a long bubble bath. She was worried about what was going on in the city, but she took a sleeping pill. She stayed in her seventeenth-floor apartment. She holed up in her apartment for days, but did not leave her computer on so she could research as much as she could—Emily was a reporter, remember. She was a reporter who neither reported nor recorded anything that was going on. She didn’t right anything down. She didn’t type anything. She didn’t take a single photograph with her cell phone. Nothing.
The biggest example of Emily’s—and, by extension, the book’s—stupidity is that she thought riding her bicycle from Manhattan to Alaska (heading due north before heading west, too) was a smarter decision than teaching herself how to drive there. My favorite, though, was that after making contact via telephone with a research team in Alaska, Emily rejected the idea of getting out of New York: “What? I’m not planning on leaving my apartment, let alone New York. Why would I need to get out of New York?”
Another one of the things that really bothered me was that Emily’s building had one elevator. It is a high end building with at least twenty floors of apartments and forty units per floor. One elevator? Nah, son. But the story required there to be only one elevator, which the author made undesirable to his heroine, because he needed her to trudge up and down sixteen flights of stairs every time she traveled to and from her apartment.
The dumbest thing about the novel that wasn’t related to Emily’s thought processes was the woman’s last night in her apartment, a day after the power had gone out. One of the creatures chewed threw the floor above Emily’s apartment, fell into her bedroom, and knocked over a lit candle. Emily didn’t notice the fire right away; she only did so when standing by her apartment’s front door. The smoke traveled from the bedroom to the front door, but not into the exposed apartment above her? If it was strong enough to make it to the front of the apartment, would her unit’s fire alarm not have gone off? Fire alarms do have batteries, right? Like I said, the author did not think his story through to completion. After letting the creature out through her front door (yes, she let it out, mainly because she—the author, really—forgot that Emily had a shotgun at her disposal), Emily looks through the peephole into the unlit hallway and saw creatures there. Because this was the world’s most magical peephole, Emily was able to see creatures in the hallway even after backing away from the door. The next day, when she was leaving, she was able to see and avoid falling through holes that had been chewed through the floor. We know she didn’t use the flashlight to see them because we read that she didn’t turn it on until she reached the stairwell. Emily Baxter, our heroine. Maybe she was immune to the red rain because she has built-in SONAR.
I don’t know whether or not the author ever lived in New York or visited the city, but his writing demonstrates very little knowledge of the city. Emily’s boyfriend, Nathan, was a New York City police officer. He was described as tolerant of Emily’s “ability to swear like a proverbial sailor.” You see, “Dating was hard enough in this town; finding someone to put up with her inordinate knowledge of cuss words was even harder.” What New York City is this guy talking about? Speaking of Nathan, a New York City cop would never say “I couldn’t even get within ten miles of the precinct.” First of all, New Yorkers—city dwellers, period—don’t think in terms of miles. Second, and more importantly, Manhattan is only 13 miles long and a couple of miles wide. If the officer was stationed in that borough, then he would have spoken in blocks or given a specific street. If he needed to report to a different borough, then he would have said that he couldn’t get anywhere near it. What good do “miles” do anyone here? Also, what New Yorker thinks of the state? Every New Yorker I know thinks of the city. The state is just…a place. “Is that just here or throughout the state?” is only asked by a New Yorker in fiction.
The geography of the story frustrated me often. Emily’s apartment is described “handy for the Sixty-Sixth Street and Lincoln Center subway station.” Later we read that she leaves her apartment on her bicycle, heads southwest on Amsterdam until she turns left onto Eighty-Sixth. This places her apartment at least twenty blocks north of Lincoln Center Plaza. Umm… When Emily finally decides to leave New York, she planned heading directly North. “If she did that she would be out of the city I a day at most.” How big does he think New York is?
Extinction Point also lacked completeness. There was a beginning—really, it was just the beginning of a beginning—but no middle, and certainly no end. Instead of a novel or the opening of a series, this was more like the opening installment of a serial that would have shown up in the Saturday Evening Post a century ago.
Extinction Point is a novel that lacked continuity. It is a post-apocalyptic tale that lacks desperation. It is a story of science fiction that is less scientific than an episode of Looney Toons. After the red rain falls, Emily decided that people got sick and died due to a virus. She did not think it; she did not hypothesize it. No, Emily knew it. Later in the novel, she decided the red rain was alien. No scientific clues, no evidence, no actual thought behind it. As the entire novel is spent inside of the woman’s head going through every inane thought, I find it reasonable to expect that we would have read Emily’s decision process on the cause of the apocalyptic event if she actually had one. Figuring out the cause is only the single most important plot point this book would have been able to offer.
But Emily never seemed to grasp the gravity of her situation. The further removed I am from finishing the book, I actually grow convinced that the author was more concerned with showing how talented a wordsmith he can be than he was with staying true to the story. How else to explain the inclusion of the following prose as Emily leaves her apartment for the last time:
Despite everything I’ve written so far, Extinction Point’s biggest failing is its absurdity. Actually, its biggest failing is the writing itself. There were some funny moments and some good turns of phrase. They were, unfortunately, few, far between, and lacked any cohesiveness. I really don’t know what the author was thinking. I do know he was in love with his words. “It was like watching some strange migration.” No, it was not like watching some strange migration. It was watching a strange migration. “She knew, with a concrete certainty that sank deep to the bottom of her stomach, the world would remember this day, and those that followed it, for as long as there was still a human race.” Gee, you think?
Whenever he tried to put together a poignant or emphatic moment, it fell flat. Usually, it was because he couldn’t leave a sentence alone and, instead, had to stamp it with Emily’s feeling about it. Emily is an idiot, so this never helps. “This sickness, this red plague, did not seem to discriminate between species, and Emily was pretty sure that was a very bad thing.” Also, “Now that she had seen what had crawled out of one of those cocoons with her own eyes, there was little doubt left that what she had witnessed over the past few days was connected, part of some unfathomable plan.”
Oh, Emily. How stupid can a protagonist be? When it comes to her and her trip, the answer is immensely. Many reviews about Extinction Point go on and on about how stupid it was that Emily decided to ride instead of drive to Alaska, but that decision was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dumb decisions. Emily packed a tiny apartment onto her bike. Multiple wool sweaters, multiple parkas, multiple pairs of shoes, multiple gallons of water, multiple pairs of socks, multiple T-shirts, multiple multiples of multiples, as if she wouldn’t come across a store or home during the 4,400+ mile trip to Alaska. In total, it had to be a couple hundred pounds of stuff.
The final 20% of Extinction Point must be treated as an entity unto itself. Even though I had considered the first 80% to be the dumbest book I’d ever read, I now refer to that final fifth as “the dumb part”. It was…special. Emily brought an entire Wal-Mart with her on her bike, but she didn’t think to bring a map or a pair of sunglasses. Of course, that means she had trouble with morning sun and she got lost. Yes, she did have a GPS with her, but she had an “innate stubbornness to refuse to rely on technology unless she absolutely had to. The GPS and sat-phone were not going to work forever, so the sooner she learned to get by without them the quicker she would become self-sufficient.” Where I come from, using the tools that are available to you is the definition of self-sufficiency. Why did she even bring the GPS?
The most ridiculous thing Emily failed to bring with her was a tent. You’re probably thinking that she could just sleep in people’s houses, in their beds. Emily, darling little saint that she is, has a moral objection to doing that. Even though she’s the last known survivor of the lower forty-eight, Emily has a moral objection to sleeping in others’ beds. She’ll break into houses and scavenge for food, but she can’t sleep in a bed. I know, I know; I don’t get it either.
The most important thing she forgot to bring with her was a contingency plan. Jones’ text explicitly states so.
After a fire forces Emily into a panicked detour, she comes across a “forest unlike any that had ever existed on Earth before,” a forest of alien trees. After a week of cowering and refusing to act like the only reporter on the ground in the face of the story of all-time, she decides to stop riding her bike and stick her hands into the alien goo. Instead of trying to ride her bike around the forest or find another way, Emily decided that the safest and smartest way to run away from the aliens was to WALK HER BICYCLE THROUGH THE ALIEN FOREST. She was already nursing a pretty bad shoulder injury. I will never understand how this was a healthier or safer option than riding her bike around the forest. Of course she was attacked by monsters and of course she forgot she had the shotgun and of course she was rescued BY THE LAST LIVING DOG ON EARTH, a dog from Valhalla, New York named—yes, you guessed it—Thor. Prior to that climactic scene, the creatures had shown exactly zero interest in Emily. What’s one more contradiction?
A reader is left with no conclusion but to believe that the only reason for the fire, the fire, and the monsters was to have Thor save Emily. Why didn’t the author just give Emily a dog at the beginning of the book? Did he not realize that many apartments in New York City are pet-friendly.
I joked with my wife that the author was not use UPS—he can’t make logistics work for him. (Thank you! Thank you! I’ll be here all week.) Extinction Point was a logistical nightmare. Practicality, geography, science, societal understanding, and common sense are but a sample of the ideals that never made an appearance in a novel whose protagonist, who also served as the only POV character—and, for a good 80% of the novel, its only character at all—is a veteran newspaper reporter. Some stories are plot driven. Some are character driven. Extinction Point is deus ex machina driven. There is no reason, no logic, behind the action. I can only go through so much of it here, but nearly every page contained something frustrating enough to make me laugh.
F
NOTE: Whenever passages from the book are quoted, all emphases are mine.
This review is full of spoilers. I can’t even begin to describe how incomplete, how uninspiring, how nothing this book was without spoiling it. Besides, you really don’t want to read it. Trust me on this.
I read Extinction Point because my wife downloaded a free sample on her Kindle, read it, and thought the book might be something we’d enjoy reading together. Boy, was she wrong. That I promised to read the book to completion is the only reason that I didn’t dump it a third of the way through it. Yes, Extinction Point was that bad, bad enough to stand as the single worst post-apocalyptic book I’ve ever read. It offended me on an intellectual level.
The idea, the concept behind the novel, was something that could be worked and developed into something great, but my overall impression is that Extinction Point was not well thought out. The execution and details were major failures.
Before I discuss them, let me give you a brief overview of the book: Emily Baxter is a reporter for New York City daily newspaper. Emily grew up on a farm in Iowa, did not leave the state until she was in her twenties, and yet, never learned how to drive. As the novel opens, she lives in Manhattan on the seventeenth floor of a higher end apartment building. One day, a mysterious red rain falls on Europe and then, hours later, the United States. Within eight hours after the fall of the red rain, seemingly all animal life dies except Emily. A couple of days later, Emily posts her cell phone number on every social media site she can think of. A day or so later, she receives a phone call from a research center in Alaska where a team—supposedly; we never hear from or of anyone other than a man named Jacob—of scientists survived. They suggest Emily come to them.
Much of Extinction Point’s many problems are caused by the author’s use of language. The novel read to me as a collection of words that the author thought might sound pretty together. Sadly, many of his words and phrases failed to make any sense when put into context. “His face turning as white as the blood-splattered sheet of paper he still clutched in his free hand” makes no sense. My absolute favorite:
The line of work Emily was in had long ago taught her to trust her gut instinct. For some unknown, subconscious reason, she hesitated at the threshold of the apartment, the flat of her left hand resting against the door, her right hand clenched so tightly around the ax handle that she could feel her nails digging into the flesh of her palm. Something did not feel right, she realized. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but she had a definite sense of offness about what she was hearing. From the dark apartment beyond the door the wail of the child sounded again, louder now that she was so close, breaking through her indecision.He just loved contradicting himself throughout the book. “She was glad she had brought the flashlight with her, as the interior of the store gradually became darker the farther back she walked. She fished the flashlight out of her backpack switched it on, and twisted the beam adjuster until it gave off a wide angle of light that pushed back the remaining darkness. There was almost enough light to see by without the flashlight…” Another: “Emily didn’t think there would be any kind of threat in the store; Mike was too smart to have stayed. He would have gone home and died with his family just like millions of other Americans probably had.”
Wagghhhhh!!!
A scene from the movie The Shining—the one where an insane Jack Nicholson chops down the door to his kid’s room with an ax—leaped unbidden into her mind, sending a shudder of unease down her spine, but she dismissed it as just nerves.
Many of the protagonist’s thought processes failed to make any sense. Everyone around Emily is dead, but when she saw a body under a blanket on the sidewalk, she calls out to it and runs up to it with the full expectation that it’s a living person who’s sleeping on the street. Why would she expect this man to be alive? If he was alive, why, considering that everyone else is dead, would he still be sleeping on the street.
That’s but one example of Emily proving to be the dumbest ELE survivor in literary history. There are scores of others. She was worried about drinking tap water after everyone died, but she was comfortable taking a long bubble bath. She was worried about what was going on in the city, but she took a sleeping pill. She stayed in her seventeenth-floor apartment. She holed up in her apartment for days, but did not leave her computer on so she could research as much as she could—Emily was a reporter, remember. She was a reporter who neither reported nor recorded anything that was going on. She didn’t right anything down. She didn’t type anything. She didn’t take a single photograph with her cell phone. Nothing.
The biggest example of Emily’s—and, by extension, the book’s—stupidity is that she thought riding her bicycle from Manhattan to Alaska (heading due north before heading west, too) was a smarter decision than teaching herself how to drive there. My favorite, though, was that after making contact via telephone with a research team in Alaska, Emily rejected the idea of getting out of New York: “What? I’m not planning on leaving my apartment, let alone New York. Why would I need to get out of New York?”
Another one of the things that really bothered me was that Emily’s building had one elevator. It is a high end building with at least twenty floors of apartments and forty units per floor. One elevator? Nah, son. But the story required there to be only one elevator, which the author made undesirable to his heroine, because he needed her to trudge up and down sixteen flights of stairs every time she traveled to and from her apartment.
The dumbest thing about the novel that wasn’t related to Emily’s thought processes was the woman’s last night in her apartment, a day after the power had gone out. One of the creatures chewed threw the floor above Emily’s apartment, fell into her bedroom, and knocked over a lit candle. Emily didn’t notice the fire right away; she only did so when standing by her apartment’s front door. The smoke traveled from the bedroom to the front door, but not into the exposed apartment above her? If it was strong enough to make it to the front of the apartment, would her unit’s fire alarm not have gone off? Fire alarms do have batteries, right? Like I said, the author did not think his story through to completion. After letting the creature out through her front door (yes, she let it out, mainly because she—the author, really—forgot that Emily had a shotgun at her disposal), Emily looks through the peephole into the unlit hallway and saw creatures there. Because this was the world’s most magical peephole, Emily was able to see creatures in the hallway even after backing away from the door. The next day, when she was leaving, she was able to see and avoid falling through holes that had been chewed through the floor. We know she didn’t use the flashlight to see them because we read that she didn’t turn it on until she reached the stairwell. Emily Baxter, our heroine. Maybe she was immune to the red rain because she has built-in SONAR.
I don’t know whether or not the author ever lived in New York or visited the city, but his writing demonstrates very little knowledge of the city. Emily’s boyfriend, Nathan, was a New York City police officer. He was described as tolerant of Emily’s “ability to swear like a proverbial sailor.” You see, “Dating was hard enough in this town; finding someone to put up with her inordinate knowledge of cuss words was even harder.” What New York City is this guy talking about? Speaking of Nathan, a New York City cop would never say “I couldn’t even get within ten miles of the precinct.” First of all, New Yorkers—city dwellers, period—don’t think in terms of miles. Second, and more importantly, Manhattan is only 13 miles long and a couple of miles wide. If the officer was stationed in that borough, then he would have spoken in blocks or given a specific street. If he needed to report to a different borough, then he would have said that he couldn’t get anywhere near it. What good do “miles” do anyone here? Also, what New Yorker thinks of the state? Every New Yorker I know thinks of the city. The state is just…a place. “Is that just here or throughout the state?” is only asked by a New Yorker in fiction.
The geography of the story frustrated me often. Emily’s apartment is described “handy for the Sixty-Sixth Street and Lincoln Center subway station.” Later we read that she leaves her apartment on her bicycle, heads southwest on Amsterdam until she turns left onto Eighty-Sixth. This places her apartment at least twenty blocks north of Lincoln Center Plaza. Umm… When Emily finally decides to leave New York, she planned heading directly North. “If she did that she would be out of the city I a day at most.” How big does he think New York is?
Extinction Point also lacked completeness. There was a beginning—really, it was just the beginning of a beginning—but no middle, and certainly no end. Instead of a novel or the opening of a series, this was more like the opening installment of a serial that would have shown up in the Saturday Evening Post a century ago.
Extinction Point is a novel that lacked continuity. It is a post-apocalyptic tale that lacks desperation. It is a story of science fiction that is less scientific than an episode of Looney Toons. After the red rain falls, Emily decided that people got sick and died due to a virus. She did not think it; she did not hypothesize it. No, Emily knew it. Later in the novel, she decided the red rain was alien. No scientific clues, no evidence, no actual thought behind it. As the entire novel is spent inside of the woman’s head going through every inane thought, I find it reasonable to expect that we would have read Emily’s decision process on the cause of the apocalyptic event if she actually had one. Figuring out the cause is only the single most important plot point this book would have been able to offer.
But Emily never seemed to grasp the gravity of her situation. The further removed I am from finishing the book, I actually grow convinced that the author was more concerned with showing how talented a wordsmith he can be than he was with staying true to the story. How else to explain the inclusion of the following prose as Emily leaves her apartment for the last time:
Leaving it behind was going to be painful not only because of her deep emotional investment but because, when she stepped outside that door for the final time, she was also stepping away from the last remnants of her old life and all the security that came with it.What? Everyone she’s ever known has been dead nearly a week, her adopted hometown has been taken over by what she believes are aliens, and the author treats it as if she’s leaving home for a job in the big city.
Emily Baxter, a shotgun in one hand and all that was left of her worldly possessions strapped to her back, opened the door to her apartment, stepped outside, and closed the door on her old life as she began a new journey out into the unkown.
Whenever he tried to put together a poignant or emphatic moment, it fell flat. Usually, it was because he couldn’t leave a sentence alone and, instead, had to stamp it with Emily’s feeling about it. Emily is an idiot, so this never helps. “This sickness, this red plague, did not seem to discriminate between species, and Emily was pretty sure that was a very bad thing.” Also, “Now that she had seen what had crawled out of one of those cocoons with her own eyes, there was little doubt left that what she had witnessed over the past few days was connected, part of some unfathomable plan.”
Oh, Emily. How stupid can a protagonist be? When it comes to her and her trip, the answer is immensely. Many reviews about Extinction Point go on and on about how stupid it was that Emily decided to ride instead of drive to Alaska, but that decision was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dumb decisions. Emily packed a tiny apartment onto her bike. Multiple wool sweaters, multiple parkas, multiple pairs of shoes, multiple gallons of water, multiple pairs of socks, multiple T-shirts, multiple multiples of multiples, as if she wouldn’t come across a store or home during the 4,400+ mile trip to Alaska. In total, it had to be a couple hundred pounds of stuff.
The final 20% of Extinction Point must be treated as an entity unto itself. Even though I had considered the first 80% to be the dumbest book I’d ever read, I now refer to that final fifth as “the dumb part”. It was…special. Emily brought an entire Wal-Mart with her on her bike, but she didn’t think to bring a map or a pair of sunglasses. Of course, that means she had trouble with morning sun and she got lost. Yes, she did have a GPS with her, but she had an “innate stubbornness to refuse to rely on technology unless she absolutely had to. The GPS and sat-phone were not going to work forever, so the sooner she learned to get by without them the quicker she would become self-sufficient.” Where I come from, using the tools that are available to you is the definition of self-sufficiency. Why did she even bring the GPS?
The most ridiculous thing Emily failed to bring with her was a tent. You’re probably thinking that she could just sleep in people’s houses, in their beds. Emily, darling little saint that she is, has a moral objection to doing that. Even though she’s the last known survivor of the lower forty-eight, Emily has a moral objection to sleeping in others’ beds. She’ll break into houses and scavenge for food, but she can’t sleep in a bed. I know, I know; I don’t get it either.
The most important thing she forgot to bring with her was a contingency plan. Jones’ text explicitly states so.
After a fire forces Emily into a panicked detour, she comes across a “forest unlike any that had ever existed on Earth before,” a forest of alien trees. After a week of cowering and refusing to act like the only reporter on the ground in the face of the story of all-time, she decides to stop riding her bike and stick her hands into the alien goo. Instead of trying to ride her bike around the forest or find another way, Emily decided that the safest and smartest way to run away from the aliens was to WALK HER BICYCLE THROUGH THE ALIEN FOREST. She was already nursing a pretty bad shoulder injury. I will never understand how this was a healthier or safer option than riding her bike around the forest. Of course she was attacked by monsters and of course she forgot she had the shotgun and of course she was rescued BY THE LAST LIVING DOG ON EARTH, a dog from Valhalla, New York named—yes, you guessed it—Thor. Prior to that climactic scene, the creatures had shown exactly zero interest in Emily. What’s one more contradiction?
A reader is left with no conclusion but to believe that the only reason for the fire, the fire, and the monsters was to have Thor save Emily. Why didn’t the author just give Emily a dog at the beginning of the book? Did he not realize that many apartments in New York City are pet-friendly.
I joked with my wife that the author was not use UPS—he can’t make logistics work for him. (Thank you! Thank you! I’ll be here all week.) Extinction Point was a logistical nightmare. Practicality, geography, science, societal understanding, and common sense are but a sample of the ideals that never made an appearance in a novel whose protagonist, who also served as the only POV character—and, for a good 80% of the novel, its only character at all—is a veteran newspaper reporter. Some stories are plot driven. Some are character driven. Extinction Point is deus ex machina driven. There is no reason, no logic, behind the action. I can only go through so much of it here, but nearly every page contained something frustrating enough to make me laugh.
F
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Point and Shoot
Point and Shoot by Duane Swierczynski
After the greatness that was Hell and Gone, I expected the final installment of the Charlie Hardie trilogy to be at least a bit of a letdown. While the novel did live up to that expectation, it was still pretty good. It was just what we’ve come to expect from both Charlie Hardie and author Duane Swierczynski. It was full of death, destruction, and mayhem. And though the particulars of the ending were not surprising, the details of how we got there were.
Only two negatives about the book for me. Unfortunately, they were both rather big. First, I felt denied a proper resolution for Mann. I’m sure plenty of other readers disagree, but I felt cheated. That left a bitter taste in my mouth. Huge disappointment.
The other negative was the large amount of recaps. I know and expect that series contain brief expositions of what happened in previous books. I don’t always like it, but it’s fine. Point and Shoot had a lot of them, and they were not brief. Usually, the recaps are sprinkled near the beginnings of books. Not this time. It felt to me as if they grew more frequent the further along the book went. It threw off the rhythm of my reading and took me out of the story on a few occasions.
So while the story was fine, I was left a little displeased. All in all, it was an OK, but not really satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.
C+
After the greatness that was Hell and Gone, I expected the final installment of the Charlie Hardie trilogy to be at least a bit of a letdown. While the novel did live up to that expectation, it was still pretty good. It was just what we’ve come to expect from both Charlie Hardie and author Duane Swierczynski. It was full of death, destruction, and mayhem. And though the particulars of the ending were not surprising, the details of how we got there were.
Only two negatives about the book for me. Unfortunately, they were both rather big. First, I felt denied a proper resolution for Mann. I’m sure plenty of other readers disagree, but I felt cheated. That left a bitter taste in my mouth. Huge disappointment.
The other negative was the large amount of recaps. I know and expect that series contain brief expositions of what happened in previous books. I don’t always like it, but it’s fine. Point and Shoot had a lot of them, and they were not brief. Usually, the recaps are sprinkled near the beginnings of books. Not this time. It felt to me as if they grew more frequent the further along the book went. It threw off the rhythm of my reading and took me out of the story on a few occasions.
So while the story was fine, I was left a little displeased. All in all, it was an OK, but not really satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.
C+
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