John

Pseudoscientific nonsense

Revisado: 11-16-21

This book is based on the DISC system, which is pseudoscientific hootenany. I recommend one of the dozens of other pop-psych books on psychopaths out there.

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Amazing story

Revisado: 10-18-20

If you're a fan of character-driven horror with a slow rollout and huge payoff, in the vein of King at his best, you've got to read this one. It's not really a haunted-house tale, though it's marketed as one. It's more a cursed family. The end goes just crazy, in a way that a novel has to really earn for it to not seem ridiculous. This one earns it.

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A creepy, suspenseful story with great characters

Revisado: 10-18-20

I expected to have a difficult time with this one after the first few minutes because I thought I would hate these characters. They're vain, petty, and acerbic. They're written with a complex empathy that really drew me in, though. Even a particularly disturbing revelation about the main character about halfway through didn't turn her unsympathetic.

This is a great character study about how flawed people react to a stressful situation. It's also a great horror story, and a metaphor for the necessity of grief and moving on, as well.

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Oof.

Revisado: 10-18-20

This author has a bad habit of giving huge exposition dumps through internal monologue of the POV character. It's sometimes so frequent and lengthy that it's laughable. There are frequent POV switches, and it often feels that they only exist so we can get an info download from that character's brain.

The premise and setting are interesting, but they're populated with flat characters. These one-dimensional characters are crammed into a coming-of-age narrative that really needs complex, nuanced characters to work. When you write a parent whose only notable feature seems to be an abusive personality, then have a reconciliation narrative with their child, the unintentional implications are... uncomfortable, at least.

The identity of one character is kept secret through most of the book, even though they appear in several scenes. This is completely unnecessary, because the character's identity can be easily figured out with a few seconds of process of elimination. The only effect this secret has is to make certain scenes with that character awkward, especially since the inner-monologue technique the author writes with is completely incompatible with a secret character. Why would the POV character just start omitting identifying details from their inner monologue just to maintain dramatic irony?

The author really needs to trust her audience to understand certain things through implication or even just deduction, rather than spelling everything out through exposition dumps.

The reader's performance is fine.

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A vampire story with real-world horror

Revisado: 09-12-20

Although this takes the form of a vampire story, it's really about the horrors of gaslighting, the abuse of the small at the hands of the strong, and the strength of motherhood in the face of extremity.

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Decent survey course obnoxiously taught

Revisado: 03-06-20

A good overview of Western music taught by Wallace Shawn, if Wallace Shawn was a reactionary medievalist. If you can't get through delivering an introductory music course without sneering about diversity and political correctness, you're probably insufferable.

This is the price of tenure.

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Just a great story

Revisado: 05-28-18

This is an amazing story. Even if you're straight, even if you're not really into the furry thing, the characters are well-developed, the settings (modern and historical) are engrossing, and the story is so sad and sweet and lovely. This book has inspired my own writing. Buying the sequel immediately.

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Sound engineering fail

Revisado: 03-01-18

It's a great story, but this is one of the worst audiobook productions I've ever heard. The narrator's voice is so soft it tempts you to turn up the volume. Whatever you do, don't do that! You'll be deafened when the random bursts of instrument noise (it cannot be called music) decide to kick in. If you want to avoid hearing damage, you'll just have to keep the volume low and miss whatever the narrator says during the 2+ minutes at a time the instrument-noise plays.

This story deserves a better audiobook version.

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Boring mouthpiece for the author's politics

Revisado: 04-30-16

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

BNP members, maybe. If they're not turned off by the author's obsession with smoking.

Would you ever listen to anything by Stephen Leather again?

Nope

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

The Welsh accent was a bit silly.

Any additional comments?

Every character in this book exists to trumpet the author's politics, either as a strawman target of them or a mouthpiece for them. Some particularly egregious examples include a housing welfare recipient who literally says "I'm entitled, so fuck 'em!" about her neighbors and a taxi driver who brags about getting asylum in England for being Taliban. I wanted a fun supernatural mystery, not a boring political tirade.

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Great book, awful reader.

Revisado: 01-28-13

Would you be willing to try another one of Bronson Pinchot’s performances?

I will absolutely never buy another recording by Bronson Pinchot.

Any additional comments?

I have loved this book since I first read it as a child. Listening to it helped me get through my work day, but the recording itself was a total disappointment. Bronson's Pinchot's monotone, staccato delivery only exacerbates the (minor) flaws in King's early writing, and his ridiculous voice for Flagg makes him sound like a lisping My Little Pony villain.

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