Book Review and Discussion – THE DARK TOWER

It’s been two days of me talking about myself and I decided to fire out a book review/discussion of one of my favourite fantasy/sci-fi series: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.

Before The Dark Tower, I had never read any Stephen King. In fact, I had barely seen any of the movies based on his work. I had seen Shawshank and The Green Mile and Stand by Me, but not even IT or The Shining or any of his horror stuff. From the pop culture references, I gathered that he was a pulp writer who wrote horror stories about haunted toasters and pumped out, like, twenty works a year.

In a way, I guess I was right. I’ve read some of the plots of his books, and they often do deal with “normal people have crazy things happen to them”-type of stories. However, at some point over Christmas 2011, I met up with an ex-girlfriend and clicked with her current beau. He was a really nice guy and we spoke of Game of Thrones together. He mentioned that The Dark Tower was a great series and, after finishing A Dance with Dragons, I jumped into the first book in Stephen King’s magnum opus, The Gunslinger.

I enjoyed it. It was one of those books that I thought was going to be a 5 but ended up being an 8 although I yearned for it to be a 10. I eventually read the rest of them over the course of two years. The last four novels took the least amount of time, about a month or so.

I’m not a fan of series unless there’s an ending. I hate books that just go on and on. I mean, they are stories. They’re there to tell a story. If a story never ends then what’s the point? It’s like listening to a child talk. They just jabber on forever. I once taught a child in History. I asked the class about Hitler.

“Anyone here know about a man named Adolf Hitler?”

“Was he the one who hated the Jews?”

“Anything a bit more specific?”

And up popped this child’s hand. “He was the leader of Germany in the second World War.”

“Well done, child.”

“And he had concentration camps which were prisons for people he didn’t like.”

“Well done.”

“And they were innocent and only guilty of being black or Jewish or disabled.”

“Wow, you know loads.”

“And he married his cousin and only had one ball-”

“Uh huh-”

“-and his second in command was gay and he had a dog named Blondie and he killed himself-”

“-Okay, we should stop now-”

“-And he was being bombed and they dropped poos on him because they hated him and-”

This went on forever and is a (mostly) true story. I added in some true facts there because most of the stuff he said was shite. The fact is, that, although entertaining for a while, it got annoying. I don’t care about happy endings or anything like that, I just want an ending. After two years, The Dark Tower gave me an ending, but, to paraphrase words of King himself, it was not an ending that I might have wanted, but an ending nonetheless.

LOST could have learnt from that shit.

Book Review – KILLING FLOOR by LEE CHILDS

I have never given up on a book and I am very proud of that fact. On occasion, I have left a book for a while but I have always returned to it. It took me almost a year to read Neil DeGrasse-Tyson’s Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries because every couple of chapters, I needed to go into a dark room and stare into middle-distance before my anxiety actually killed me.

Seriously. I’m surprised we’ve lasted so long without being murdered by space rocks.

My book group in work suggested this book, Lee Child’s debut 1997 novel and the first in the Jack Reacher series. I was told that this book would me want to read the entire series. I’m not usually a fan of pulp airport-trash novels, but I understand that they have their place. I am a big fan, however, of Matthew Reilly’s Shane Scofield/Scarecrow series, so I gave this book a shot.

This book is interesting for two reasons: the first is that it is nowhere near as interesting as the Reilly books I had originally compared it to. The second is that I have never had the least amount of fun reading a book quickly.

I’ll do the latter first then the former.

I read this book quite quickly. Like a hangover breakfast, I forced it into me because I knew that, although I wasn’t enjoying myself, I needed to finish it one way or another. I hated every god-damned stupid sentence that I subjected myself to. Simply put, this is not just a bad book. No, a bad book is one that is simply a waste of time. Even a bad book can be enjoyed in retrospect. Many times, I have not enjoyed reading a book, but afterwards, in the twilight, as I am mulling over it, I think to myself, “You know what? That was a good book. I really liked it. I just didn’t enjoy it at the time.” Dracula, I am ashamed to say, is one of those books. At times, Dracula bored me, but afterwards I understood why it was written that way and I love it. Frankenstein was similar.

Killing Floor is beyond a bad book. I am happy that I have read it simply because now I know to never read another Lee Childs book ever again.

The reasons for this are countless, but I will try to state them as they come to me:

1. Terrible characterisation. Everyone is a 2D, boring cliché of a character.
2. The plot sucks. It pretends to be this elaborate conspiracy, when really, it’s just a Scooby-Doo plot.
3. Bond villains who explain their plans and fire out exposition continuously.
4. Everyone speaks exactly the same.
5. Everyone is a fucking genius when they need to be and a complete CHUD the rest of the time. An example is when Reacher, the main character, instead of simply telling another character the answer to a question, makes them work it out. And they do. They work it out so quickly that you wonder why they asked the fucking question in the first place.
6. Cosmic coincidences. The entire plot is balanced on coincidences. Apparently these coincidences are explained in a later book, but I find it amazing that publishers felt that this terrible plot was worth printing on paper.
7. Reacher makes no fucking sense. He suffers a horrible tragedy and then goes and has sex eight or nine times with a girl he just met. That would be fine, if it were a coping mechanism, but it’s not. He just forgot about the tragedy and fell in love with this girl. And she is the same. She’s in a horrific situation and the pair of them just have sex and go and dance like idiots, completely forgetting that their lives are in danger and people are dead.
8. The prose is terrible. There are no commas. No commas at all. And you think it’s a stylistic choice at first. But it’s not. It sounds like the book is narrated by a monosyllabic goon. But he’s smart. Very smart. Too smart. And tough. Very tough. Like leather. Like jerky. Like eggs. Mmm eggs.

In short, the book is a shambles. A complete clusterfuck of a piece of shit. There are no emotions in the book at all. At first, again, like every other problem with this book, I thought it was a stylistic choice, but it isn’t. Lee Childs has a bunch of roles that he can turn into characters, but he fails on every level. I’m actually offended that this man was paid money for creating this waste of time. I’m offended that I spent money on making my life a little worse.

The former problem is not as big. The book is boring. The “action” sequences are played out with the gusto of someone playing hide and seek with a bunch of blind, deaf and dumb children who don’t understand that they’re playing a game. The fights are boring. Again, I thought it was a stylistic choice, like Reacher has been in so many fights that he finds them boring, but then later when he describes the adrenaline surge and exhilaration at surviving, it is given with the same lifeless pace and lack of energy that it is like Steven Wright is reading the book to you, only it’s not funny.

It’s not funny at all. It’s not entertaining. I want my hours back, Lee Childs, you talentless fuck.