The Eight Deadly Words
Jul. 16th, 2002 05:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_aeonsIt's even worse than you think.
I Hate All The Characters In This Book.
The book is Greg Iles' 'Mortal Fear' (which is a slightly less pathetically generic title than I had originally thought in light of the events of the book, but only slightly), and if you own a copy, I urge you to burn it.
The bad guy is a pretentious git who somehow lures women to their deaths with his — what? His nauseating prose? Anyone who actually uses the phrase 'I am come' deserves to bleed to death in the ditch. The narrator is an imbecile who can't seem to keep his dick in his pants for five minutes and habitually lies to everyone, but is shocked and borderline obsessed when he learns that he isn't the only man his proto-chick wife has slept with. I don't even want to talk about the psychiatrist. It took me the entire fucking book to warm to the narrator's sidekick, partly because he acts about half as intelligent as the narrator in question goes around claiming he is.
Also, how much research did Iles do on this thing? People, if you're going to write books involving a lot of computer culture and you don't want to alienate that part of your audience that's literate, it's sometimes a good idea to do a little reading up on computers and said culture beyond, 'Okay, so I push this to turn it on?'. Christ.
Oh, and.
REAL HACKERS DO NOT HAVE SUBSCRIPTIONS TO AOL.
Okay, I feel better now.
Curiously, I've read another of Iles' books and enjoyed it; there were a handful of characters in it I genuinely liked, though half of them died nastily, and it was well-executed. I think this is an earlier novel, or something.
Most of the words I wrote yesterday and didn't like turned out to be better than I thought they were; I pray that, by the same token, some of the scant 657 I've written today will tomorrow prove to be better than they seem at the moment. More dialect tweaking: 'not' is now contracted onto the end of its verb, by analogy with 'don't' et al, e.g. 'liken't'.
I Hate All The Characters In This Book.
The book is Greg Iles' 'Mortal Fear' (which is a slightly less pathetically generic title than I had originally thought in light of the events of the book, but only slightly), and if you own a copy, I urge you to burn it.
The bad guy is a pretentious git who somehow lures women to their deaths with his — what? His nauseating prose? Anyone who actually uses the phrase 'I am come' deserves to bleed to death in the ditch. The narrator is an imbecile who can't seem to keep his dick in his pants for five minutes and habitually lies to everyone, but is shocked and borderline obsessed when he learns that he isn't the only man his proto-chick wife has slept with. I don't even want to talk about the psychiatrist. It took me the entire fucking book to warm to the narrator's sidekick, partly because he acts about half as intelligent as the narrator in question goes around claiming he is.
Also, how much research did Iles do on this thing? People, if you're going to write books involving a lot of computer culture and you don't want to alienate that part of your audience that's literate, it's sometimes a good idea to do a little reading up on computers and said culture beyond, 'Okay, so I push this to turn it on?'. Christ.
Oh, and.
REAL HACKERS DO NOT HAVE SUBSCRIPTIONS TO AOL.
Okay, I feel better now.
Curiously, I've read another of Iles' books and enjoyed it; there were a handful of characters in it I genuinely liked, though half of them died nastily, and it was well-executed. I think this is an earlier novel, or something.
Most of the words I wrote yesterday and didn't like turned out to be better than I thought they were; I pray that, by the same token, some of the scant 657 I've written today will tomorrow prove to be better than they seem at the moment. More dialect tweaking: 'not' is now contracted onto the end of its verb, by analogy with 'don't' et al, e.g. 'liken't'.
