I almost dread reading anymore because it seems like most of what I read, even stuff that should be good, sucks.
I'll talk about the ones I read within the month.
THE GODS OF HOWL MOUNTAIN
The Gods of Howl Mountain I chose because it's set in North Carolina. Came up on my Amazon suggestions. I didn't realize until I bought it that it was from the same guy who did Rednecks (a book that really disappointed me: first by beating me way to the punch on novelizing the Battle of Blair Mountain with the title I would have used, and then by doing a very poor job of it). I still gave it a chance, though. After all, his purely original fiction could be better than a novelization of an event that I have, at this point, almost become an amateur historian of.
The premise is actually pretty interesting in that it's about a Korean War veteran returning home to be a bootlegger in the same time period as the beginnings of NASCAR. There's several conflicts (with a rival bootlegger, with a murder mystery) that are set up that dont' really pay off in any kind of meaningful way.
Taylor Brown is a local hillbilly but he does what a lot of these people do (like whatever joker wrote The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart) in that they throw every symbol of Appalachia at the wall, make this goofy touristy take on it. So you run through the cliches (moonshiner, snake handler, outdoorsman, etc.). It also winds up giving a feeling like Brown is trying too hard to make his hillbillies the coolest/edgiest people ever. Brown's moonshiner clan is also uncomfortably realistic in that these people are gross trash. There's this nasty used up old whore of a grandmother that is the county abortionist and for no real reason at all the book keeps wanting to go back to this granny getting fucked by different men.
But it still had interesting stuff. The parts that dealt with cars - the proto-racing aspect of moonshining - I found interesting. But the story just wandered around with no real direction. It can (this is characteristic of Brown's work) be very pretty at times, but not as consistently as someone like Charles Frazier. After reading this one my interest in Brown's writing is dead, I gave him a second chance and he didn't live up to it.
CONCLAVE (SPOILERS)
I loved Robert Harris' Pompeii; assigned to read it in college (the only time a non-English class assigned a novel), it was when I started reading novels again after just gaming all high school and college long. Conclave, of course, was adapted into a movie recently.
I ASSUMED it was going to be a murder mystery, just for a lack of imagination as to what an intrigue involving the death of a Pope could involve. Instead it's just a political thriller, essentially. It's just about the election. But it's a very well-written "airport book." I say that because the characters are flat/weak, the prose is utilitarian, the plot isn't even all that impressive, but it is paced SO WELL that I finished the whole thing in two days, I read like 200 pages in one sitting.
Of course Harris sets up the actually serious religious Papists as the villains against the heckin wholesome reformerinos. It's a fight between two types of people I hate: Latinfaggots and pseduo-liberation theologians. But it does interesting things. Having the Black African papal candidate be felled by a sex scandal and be super anti-gay was very bold and accurate. Having Muslim terrorism play a role was interesting, although of course it has the Designated Good Candidate advocate cuddling the muslims instead of cutting their heads off like the Based Designated "Villain" advocates for.
But overall, very interesting. I actually liked this one, but it leaves no real impression.
GORKY PARK
I did not enjoy this. I read it because somebody mentioned it, here, in the same breath as Disco Elysium. In that context it was because they were promised that DE would be like GP and it wasn't. For me it was the opposite, I WISH it was like DE.
You have a murder in Sovietland. You know it's Sovietland because the American writing it lays on extremely thick that it's Sovietland. It's goofy. There's cheesy lines in there riffing off primitive communism and Hegelian dialectics and nonsense like that. There's a law that if you're writing somewhat cheap thrillers your character has to fall in love with a broad for no reason at all and bang her all through the rest of the book, which our hero does.
I can't honestly say why I didn't like it or how it fell apart for me. I had started it once, couldn't get into it, set it aside, came back later and made more of an effort. Was actually liking it. But somewhere along the way it just completely lost me. I think a big chunk of the problems come from the "action scenes," which for me never flowed well, I'd somehow skim over them, lose track of what was going on, realize I hadn't picked up the passage in the first place. There's this plot set up about murdered icon counterfeiters or something that ultimately turns into an international plot to smuggle fur-bearing animals across borders.
I don't know. I don't remember half of it. I've never been so perplexed by a novel just passing over my head like that.
LOST TREASURE OF THE LANFANG REPUBLIC
Utter trash. Having NO reviews on Amazon was the real warning, but it didn't HAVE to suck. A Short Stay in Hell and Alien in a Small Town have very few reviews, very unknown, but they're both in my list of favorite novels. This thing was just total garbage. Some Singaporean doctor wrote his own novel, and I feel bad reviewing it even on here since I assume he was an amateur trying his hand at it. But he's trying to tell a treasure hunting adventure and the whole thing reads like something somebody with no experience at writing would write. The prose is like listening to someone recount events, not as a storyteller, but in the conversational manner of someone just telling you what happened.
One thing I have come to notice is that if a book dedicates much space to talking about food, it's either going to be a literary masterpiece (Lonesome Dove, Cold Mountain) or total junk. I think that what's really going on there is probably that it's a symbol of how competent the author is at managing detail. The very good author uses that stuff to paint a picture; the bad author rambles. Authors that don't dedicate much space to detail just don't stand out on their prose in the first place, they get to hide from it. You've got characters shacking up for no reason. A mindless one dimensional villain that everyone talks up as some uber scary badass that gets killed off halfway in. A treasure hunting adventure with no real puzzle that gets resolved with 100 pages to spare.
Just horrible. Horrible. Genuinely pissed me off.
Edit: Somehow this guy actually wrote it as his THIRD novel. No idea how the fuck that happened.
