![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Why do I spend more time griping about bad books than recommending good ones?
I quit reading Justin Gustainis's Black Magic Woman halfway through, and I can pretty much guarantee that I won't be reading anything else he writes.
It's not really a badly written book, as far as the technical aspects of the writing -- okay, it's not so great in the plot department, but more in an eyerolling sort of way than in a "throw the book across the room" way. But then there's everything ELSE.
The point where I stopped reading was just after the main characters' enemies tried to kill them by burning down an office building. The stairs are blocked; it's impossible to get to safety. The corridor is full of confused, frightened, milling office workers. The main characters flee to the roof along with the contact/informant that they were meeting in the office building; one of them has the ability to use magic to fly to safety, and there's a whole "save yourself, leave me" conversation, after which she flies them all to safety, and then there's a relieved "yay, we're safe" conversation, and they head off for the next part of the adventure.
What are we forgetting here? Oh, right! The building full of office workers who must have all burned to death, because in all the heroic "save yourself! leave me!" stuff, no one thought about them. And they are not mentioned again, after that one scene with panicked, trapped people running everywhere.
This probably wouldn't be the final straw, except that the book a) was annoying, disgusting and offensive in quite a few other ways, and b) hadn't managed to make me care about the characters in the first half, and was therefore unlikely to do so in the second half.
Let's see, where to begin.
- The big thing that made me almost stop reading the book in the first few chapters (and now I wish I had) was the appearance of the book's second major villain, a witch who hails from an African voodoo cult (... yeah, I have no idea either), and kidnaps children, vivisects them alive, and cuts off their genitals for use in rituals. EEEUURGGGHHH. The main plot of the book had to do with a grudge passed down through the generations of two (white) families from the Salem witch trials, so what the African witch and the child-torture scenes have to do with anything, I have no idea, and now I will never know because I refuse to slog through any more of this book to find out.
- The viewpoints of the villains in this book, all of them, are incredibly nasty and ugly. And while I don't expect serial killers and their henchpersons to be happy and friendly sorts, I really started to resent the author continually throwing me into their heads, because the contents of their heads literally turns my stomach. There's the African witch's Southern redneck hireling, who constantly refers to her as a n****** in his head and fantasizes about lynching her; there's the bad-guy witch from the Salem black magic family, who refers to the good-witch main character as a "Wiccunt"; and so forth.
Actually, the more of this that I write, the more I wonder why I stuck it out to the middle of the book ...
- The author has a weird verbal tic -- it's not quite infodumping; it's more subtle and annoying than that. Basically, he keeps stopping to have his characters explain really simple concepts, theoretically for each other's benefit, which just makes them all look like total idiots. For example, they meet a woman named Sidney, who then spends a whole paragraph explaining to the main characters that Sidney can be a woman's name, and talking about why her parents named her that. I mean, Sidney is not an overly common woman's name, but I can think of a few actresses and TV characters who have that name -- it's not completely unheard-of. FOR GOD'S SAKE CAN WE GET BACK TO THE PLOT, SUCH AS IT IS. Or there's the bit where a South African detective shows up in pursuit of the voodoo witch (even typing that makes me twitch), and spends several pages lecturing the local FBI on information on the crimes, which they should already know. It's a really transparent attempt to inform the reader of what's going on, but it just makes it look like the FBI don't know what they're doing. Or know how to use Google, either.
- While the plotting in the book isn't awful, there are weird lapses in plot logic all over the place -- minor stuff, but irritating. For example, one of the main characters is looking through a box containing letters that were written by people who knew his grandfather, describing his grandfather's death, and the book switches into a flashback of sorts ... the events as described in the letters he's reading, but in third person omniscient. Which is just stupid. Or, another example -- the South African detective is looking through newspaper clippings of the crimes which supposedly occurred back home in Pretoria (probably the first South African city that the author found in Wikipedia), and reading bits of them to himself (the book seems to use this method of imparting information quite a lot...), and they consistently refer to "South African [whatever]" -- so you have, say, "South African girl kidnapped", as opposed to the far more likely "Area girl kidnapped..." or "Pretoria girl kidnapped...". It'd be like, say, an L.A. newspaper leading into a story about a local crime/local perp with "American man arrested today ..." HEAD. DESK.
Oh! And I forgot to mention that one of the main characters is from Texas, so he says "podner" all the time. That's how you know he's from Texas, I guess. It got to the point where I just wanted to go through all his dialogue with a Sharpie marker and black out the word "podner" every time it appeared because it was DRIVING ME CRAZY. This is pretty typical of Gustainis's subtle and nuanced characterization.
The short conclusion: Save your sanity. Avoid this book.
It's not really a badly written book, as far as the technical aspects of the writing -- okay, it's not so great in the plot department, but more in an eyerolling sort of way than in a "throw the book across the room" way. But then there's everything ELSE.
The point where I stopped reading was just after the main characters' enemies tried to kill them by burning down an office building. The stairs are blocked; it's impossible to get to safety. The corridor is full of confused, frightened, milling office workers. The main characters flee to the roof along with the contact/informant that they were meeting in the office building; one of them has the ability to use magic to fly to safety, and there's a whole "save yourself, leave me" conversation, after which she flies them all to safety, and then there's a relieved "yay, we're safe" conversation, and they head off for the next part of the adventure.
What are we forgetting here? Oh, right! The building full of office workers who must have all burned to death, because in all the heroic "save yourself! leave me!" stuff, no one thought about them. And they are not mentioned again, after that one scene with panicked, trapped people running everywhere.
This probably wouldn't be the final straw, except that the book a) was annoying, disgusting and offensive in quite a few other ways, and b) hadn't managed to make me care about the characters in the first half, and was therefore unlikely to do so in the second half.
Let's see, where to begin.
- The big thing that made me almost stop reading the book in the first few chapters (and now I wish I had) was the appearance of the book's second major villain, a witch who hails from an African voodoo cult (... yeah, I have no idea either), and kidnaps children, vivisects them alive, and cuts off their genitals for use in rituals. EEEUURGGGHHH. The main plot of the book had to do with a grudge passed down through the generations of two (white) families from the Salem witch trials, so what the African witch and the child-torture scenes have to do with anything, I have no idea, and now I will never know because I refuse to slog through any more of this book to find out.
- The viewpoints of the villains in this book, all of them, are incredibly nasty and ugly. And while I don't expect serial killers and their henchpersons to be happy and friendly sorts, I really started to resent the author continually throwing me into their heads, because the contents of their heads literally turns my stomach. There's the African witch's Southern redneck hireling, who constantly refers to her as a n****** in his head and fantasizes about lynching her; there's the bad-guy witch from the Salem black magic family, who refers to the good-witch main character as a "Wiccunt"; and so forth.
Actually, the more of this that I write, the more I wonder why I stuck it out to the middle of the book ...
- The author has a weird verbal tic -- it's not quite infodumping; it's more subtle and annoying than that. Basically, he keeps stopping to have his characters explain really simple concepts, theoretically for each other's benefit, which just makes them all look like total idiots. For example, they meet a woman named Sidney, who then spends a whole paragraph explaining to the main characters that Sidney can be a woman's name, and talking about why her parents named her that. I mean, Sidney is not an overly common woman's name, but I can think of a few actresses and TV characters who have that name -- it's not completely unheard-of. FOR GOD'S SAKE CAN WE GET BACK TO THE PLOT, SUCH AS IT IS. Or there's the bit where a South African detective shows up in pursuit of the voodoo witch (even typing that makes me twitch), and spends several pages lecturing the local FBI on information on the crimes, which they should already know. It's a really transparent attempt to inform the reader of what's going on, but it just makes it look like the FBI don't know what they're doing. Or know how to use Google, either.
- While the plotting in the book isn't awful, there are weird lapses in plot logic all over the place -- minor stuff, but irritating. For example, one of the main characters is looking through a box containing letters that were written by people who knew his grandfather, describing his grandfather's death, and the book switches into a flashback of sorts ... the events as described in the letters he's reading, but in third person omniscient. Which is just stupid. Or, another example -- the South African detective is looking through newspaper clippings of the crimes which supposedly occurred back home in Pretoria (probably the first South African city that the author found in Wikipedia), and reading bits of them to himself (the book seems to use this method of imparting information quite a lot...), and they consistently refer to "South African [whatever]" -- so you have, say, "South African girl kidnapped", as opposed to the far more likely "Area girl kidnapped..." or "Pretoria girl kidnapped...". It'd be like, say, an L.A. newspaper leading into a story about a local crime/local perp with "American man arrested today ..." HEAD. DESK.
Oh! And I forgot to mention that one of the main characters is from Texas, so he says "podner" all the time. That's how you know he's from Texas, I guess. It got to the point where I just wanted to go through all his dialogue with a Sharpie marker and black out the word "podner" every time it appeared because it was DRIVING ME CRAZY. This is pretty typical of Gustainis's subtle and nuanced characterization.
The short conclusion: Save your sanity. Avoid this book.
no subject
Apparently it's the first book in a whole series. Yay.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
...
*has no words*
Oh! And I forgot to mention that one of the main characters is from Texas, so he says "podner" all the time. That's how you know he's from Texas, I guess.
You mean he didn't ride up on his pony and tip his hat to all the ladies with a "Howdy y'all"? XD
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I'm always astounded that stuff like this gets published, while fanfic is considered declassé. A fanfic author who was this bad would be roundly criticized for putting out such drek, but some publisher thought this was worth foisting on the public? Amazing.
.
no subject
no subject
Thanks for making sure I never touch this book.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
also:
" who then spends a whole paragraph explaining to the main characters that Sidney can be a woman's name, and talking about why her parents named her that. I mean, Sidney is not an overly common woman's name, but I can think of a few actresses and TV characters who have that name -- it's not completely unheard-of. FOR GOD'S SAKE CAN WE GET BACK TO THE PLOT, SUCH AS IT IS."
I didn't know Sidney could be a male name...okay.
no subject
no subject
Is that like how you know I'm Australian? I say G'Day in every post and talk about the Kangaroos that hop down the main Street of Melbourne! BTW, that would be Swanston St :D