Adam B

Written by a 14 year old schoolboy

Revisado: 09-21-22

My first time trying Koontz and I’m really wondering what the fuss was about. He has a 14 years old’s grasp of psychology, motivations, and romance (Oh god, the romance. It’s full of schoolboy heroism and just totally cringeworthy.) The story is just a retread of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, crossed with Frankenstein, and maybe Cujo mixed in. But not artfully. Add in some hard boiled feds and police (on whom Koontz clearly didn’t waste his time researching how police work is done) and you have a kludged together scifi—horror—thriller—detective—romance novel that’s just incredibly ho-hum. The narrator does a decent job but there’s really no help for a bad story.

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Absolutely fantastic

Revisado: 07-26-21

Beautifully written and wonderfully narrated. The story is, by turns, astonishing, beautiful, heartbreaking, and rather terrifying. One of the best reads I’ve had in years. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

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What the hell book did everyone else read?

Revisado: 03-17-21

It’s like there are two Steven Kings, one who is a compassionate, insightful, wordsmith, who can create beautiful, deep, human characters and rich narratives—with genuine scares—and then the other one; the hack who dashes off half-baked dreck, peopled with crass, unlikeable, two-dimensional characters who plod along on predictable, forgettable, and sometimes outright laughable plot lines. I’ve actually thought that maybe his wife is the real writer, responsible for Duma Key and Doctor Sleep, and The Stand. Steven himself wrote Pet Semetary and Under The Dome. Ugh. It’s like he hates his characters. And his readers. Unfortunately, the real
Steven King also wrote this book. Is this an attempt to break into the Young Adult category? It’s cringeworthy from beginning to end. Nothing scary about it. Maybe years from now he’ll reveal that one of his kids wrote it, and I’ll feel bad about this review, but for now, I wish I could have my time and money back.
Also, Seth Nurmich? gave a, lurching and, uncertain? sort of performance that was, annoying? You get the idea—it’s like he dropped a bag full of commas and thinks all you need to do to sound like a teenager is upspeak. He may be a wonderful actor, I don’t know, but I don’t think he’s a good pick for this work. Between his grating performance and a hack writer trying, at 72, to write a modern teenager, this was not a joy to listen to.

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Warning: unexpectedly gruesome! *really*

Revisado: 09-13-20

I told a friend I was looking for more quality horror books and he directed me to this. He was pretty excited about the book.

I found the story didn’t really grab me and I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing style, but I know better than to reject a book early on those counts. The Shipping News is a prime example of a book that I initially dismissed but on second try came to love. So I stuck with it.

The book plods along mildly for awhile and then BAM! Totally disgusting, gruesome, blood-soaked disturbing violence!! It was so jarring and, honestly, kind of out of character for this person, I kept waiting for it to be a dream sequence but it wasn’t.

I stopped listening for a while, trying to digest what I’d just heard. Really disturbing stuff. Detailed descriptions...

Okay, I thought. Whew. I can steel myself and get past this awful section. I turned it back on and IT DIDN’T STOP THERE. Incredibly, that awful passage was followed immediately by another terribly gruesome passage. Sorry if I’m writing a bit obliquely, I’m trying to not spoil anything.

Anyway, that was it for me. I don’t need that stuff in my head. Those things play over and over on the screen in my mind. I can’t unread this stuff.

I remember idly flipping pages in a bookstore/coffee shop in Brooklyn circa ‘98. The book I held was called American Psycho and the page I happened to read had a girl and a rat. On that day I learned two things: 1) how disturbed humans can be, and 2) how people like me need to be careful what we put in our heads. If I could delete some things from my experience, that would be one of them. So would the passages I read in this book.

I don’t mind learning of the real things people do to each other in real life. Atrocities in war, etc. because there is some value to me in knowing what is happening to real people in the current world as well as in history, and it informs my actions and opinions. But I don’t enjoy it. It’s terrible and it saddens me. No way do I want to read about someone’s imaginings of such things.

Also, it’s violence against women in both passages and that really pushes my buttons. We have more than enough violence against women in teal life. I don’t need to read someone’s fantasy of more. And did I mention gruesome?

I’m sure it’s all very compelling and well-crafted but I’ll never find out.

Good luck to you, if you read this. You’ve been warned.

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Insufferable

Revisado: 06-10-20

Is there anything interesting in here about mushrooms? I listened gamely to the first interminable story about her feeling aggrieved about old ladies beating her to the morel mushroom trove at an orchard and kept waiting for there to be anything of interest about the subject of the book... it's supposed to be about MUSHROOMS, right? I don't want to listen to someone drone on about her journey from New York to the mushroom hunting ground and how delicious this dish was or that dish she had at that place she stayed once... If there's any interesting info about mushrooms in here, I don't have the patience to root around in the dirt to find it.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas