Tag Archives: Fiction

Book and Movie Review: Twilight

TwilightTitle: Twilight

Author: Stephenie Meyer

Genre: YA Romantic Supernatural

Read: January 2008 and Oct 2010

Summary: Confused.

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Since I’m such a vampire fan, having seen or read vast untold volumes of the stuff, I thought I should put my formal two-cents in on the strange source material that spawned the Twilight phenomenon.

First the book. I read it before the movie came out. There was a lot of buzz about it already, and I was excited about it. Generally, things that are really popular have a kernel of quality about them, and I love vampires and teen heroines. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite TV series of all time — I will blog about it one of these days. So I started reading Twilight in the Vegas airport while waiting for a flight. Despite the clunky prose (more on that later) I was actually pretty engaged in a low key way during the first half. Then Edward revealed to Bella that he was a vampire (not that I didn’t know) and the whole thing went to shit. I had to force myself through most of the rest, and the ending left me baffled. “Wait, where’d the fight go?  What about the climax?”

Back to the writing: It’s really clunky. I won’t go into too much detail, this other blogger did. But let me say Meyer is the anti Cormac McCarthy (I’m in the middle of The Road right now). He eschews punctuation, she loves it. Every long improper sentence is peppered with a random assortment of commas and em-dashes. She adores the em-dash, using it in approximately 50% of sentences, and usually not for its proper purpose of offsetting a parenthetical. Maybe she felt she had too many commas (she does), and needed to replace some of them with em-dashes for the hell of it. Oh, and she loves certain words or word combinations, like “cold fingers” and uses them several times a page in places. And she clearly choses random synonyms from the thesaurus without being aware of the connotations of said words. For example: “His expression shifted instantly to chagrin.” Can the word be used that way? I don’t think so. But none of this really matters when reading the book, you adjust and just role with it. I guess if you’re 14 and haven’t read a lot you don’t notice to begin with.

The plot and content: Given what actually happens in the first book, it’s pretty long: 118,000 words. Not much really does happen. We have a LOT of words devoted again and again to how pretty Edward is and how much Bella loves him. This isn’t really SHOWN too much, or justified, but she sure TELLS us about it a lot. But again, the first half was okay. However, once the reveal came in, it gets really silly. Basically they go play this ridiculous baseball game and the Black Eyed Peas (oops, I mean the evil vampires) walk onto the field, sniff Bella, and decide the most important thing in the world is to sink their fangs into her blood. There is no real attempt to sell anything in this plot, to provide any believable reasons, it just happens. You couldn’t possibly have more one dimensional villains — although they do compliment the one dimensional heros nicely. Then my all time biggest gripe, we close in on the unbelievable “final” confrontation of the book and Bella gets knocked unconscious (she is after all the narrator) and we miss the whole thing. It’s told to us by Edward after we know it came out okay so as to minimize tension. I had the feeling that the author didn’t know how to write an action scene, so she just chickened out.

The vampires: Oh my. It’s totally clear (particularly in later books) that Meyer doesn’t do research. This includes even watching a few vampire films or perhaps reading Dracula. Her undead aren’t really vampires, or even undead, except for being immortal and having a taste for blood, and “cold fingers.” They don’t seem dead, or particularly evil. They sparkle in the sun, they apparently have like, oh my God, no real weaknesses. And they’re all really pretty. We hear about that a lot. Let’s not forget their smorgasbord of cool psychic powers like seeing the future, and reading minds. These make hack plot construction really convenient. I actually started my novel a year before even hearing of Twilight, but reading it certainly motivated me to make sure my vampire heavy was a really bad-ass undead in a nasty evil way. He doesn’t sparkle in the sunlight but he will leave your entrails hanging from a tree to make a point — and he certainly wouldn’t ever concern himself to learn current High School vernacular.

Publishing mystery: Twilight had a very aberrant publishing history. As a first time novelist it was picked up by Jodi Reamer of Writers House really quickly. This is a very prestigious agency and that’s very rare. It was then sold quickly to a great publisher for a really huge advance. That Reamer showed interest in it is not what surprises me. There is a mysterious something about the first half of the book — it had potential. But what surprises me is that it was never edited — or if it was I’ve never heard of an editor that lax. The standard length for YA books is more like 50-70k, and there is a LOT of fluff in the book, not to mention the bad grammar and the flaccid ending that would be easy to fix. Having been through rounds and rounds of revision myself, the book was held to none of the standards my editors have exhibited. Of course it turned out to be a great decision for Jodi, but I still don’t understand why it was never edited.

The movie: Catherine Hardwicke directed the first movie. She actually did a really good job with the source material, and I think the movie is actually better than the book. Not exactly great, but better. The casting was excellent, particularly Kristen Stewart who does have a soft charisma, and she’s hot in a non obvious way. If you see her in some of her other films like Adventureland or Speak you realize that she’s actually a very fine young actress in certain roles. Twilight doesn’t provide a lot of room for subtle acting. I myself had casually known Hardwicke from when she did production design for Insomniac’s Disruptor in the mid 90’s (Insomniac was located next to my company Naughty Dog in those days). So I’d noticed when she started directing with Thirteen, which is a depressing but brilliant movie — particularly given what must have been a VERY low budget. Hardwicke brought the same kind of hand-held-documentary style to Twilight, and it worked well to offset the inherent cheese factor of the material. Not totally offset, but the result was somehow watchable. She did a nice job capturing Bella’s POV. This is tricky because in a novel, particularly a first person one like Twilight, so much of the book is dominated by the voice. With a combination of diary style voice over (more-or-less quoted from the book) and a peeping-over-the-shoulder viewpoint (as also used in Thirteen) Hardwicke pulls it off. For some reason, they ditched her with regard to directing the sequels, and the those devolve into further cheesiness. Of course so do the later novels. Can I just say Volturi?

Conclusion: I’m kinda baffled. Twilight isn’t particularly good, or well done, but it does have a certain appeal. However, the overall magnitude of success has left me totally confused. Harry Potter is ludicrously popular, but at its core rest three stunningly good initial books. The first book is really well written, the central premise is very novel and sold with incredible style. Even the ridiculously melodramatic Vampire Dairies is more fun than Twilight. I’m just left scratching my head and hoping the anti-vampire backlash isn’t too bad.

Book Review: Tropic of Night

Tropic of NightTitle: Tropic of Night

Author: Michael Gruber

Genre: Supernatural Horror Thriller

Read: Spring 2010

Summary: Very good.

I read this book both because it was represented by an agent I was interested in and because it loosely fit the ill-defined cross-genre of my own novel: Supernatural thriller with realistic style and magic. In fact, in this book it’s not even 100% clear that the magic is intended to have actually happened — but I like to think it did. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, particularly to my taste. There are three points of view, and not all are as good. One is the female protagonist, a former anthropologist hiding out in Miami from her murderous African shaman ex-husband. The second is the same character, but told in the format of journals written during her field work in Siberia and Africa. And the third is a Miami Cuban-American police detective investigated a series of horrific murders in Miami (perpetrated by the nasty shaman of course). I loved the detective, his investigations of the ritual crime scenes, and the bit of Cubano Miami flavor . The present action protagonist was okay, and the journals were intermittent. When they got into the magic stuff they were good. What I most loved about this book was the creepy and very realistic feel of the mostly Yoruba based shamanistic magic. Overall I enjoyed reading it, but the book could have benefited from some tightening up. The detective investigating this awful ritual crimes was very good too. If you like murder procedurals, and you like creepy well researched voodoo-esque magic, then give this a read.

Book Review: Hex Hall

Hex HallTitle: Hex Hall

Author: Rachel Hawkins

Genre: YA fantasy

Read: Oct 23, 2010

Summary: Fun.

Continuing my unrelenting survey of both supernatural and YA books (together and separate). This is a vaguely Harry Potter-ish tale of a fifteen-year-old witch who ends up in magical reform school. It was surprisingly decent. Not great, not super innovative, but the first person voice was very enjoyable. Occasionally I found myself cringing when the events served the plot in ham handed ways. For example, the protagonist and boy she likes are both sentenced to the same detention — just the two of them. And there are vampires, but they are treated too casually like everything else. Still, it was funny and I enjoyed reading it, I didn’t have to force myself through anything. I plan on buying the sequel. This is actually pretty high praise for a reader as jaded as myself.

Book Review: The Ghost Brigades

The Ghost BrigadesTitle: The Ghost Brigades

Author: John Scalzi

Genre: Sci-Fi/Space Opera

Read: Oct 27-28 2010

Summary: Great read!

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Since I enjoyed Old Man’s War so much I jumped right in and pounded this out last night. I might have liked it even better. The characters are a tad less likable than the first book, but there is more plot, and more aliens — remember I like aliens. The book starts off with a great prequel that holds your interest (and I’m not a prequel fan), slaps you with a nicely done twist, and is immediately obvious to the real plot that develops. This involves a Special Forces space marine who is a complete genetic construct. He is born an adult, learning to be a solider and human all at the same time in a frantic computer-in-the-head rush. There is some good Sci-Fi in here, and some really fun aliens, but it doesn’t get in the way of a really fast fun story. I’m very much reminded of a lot of my favorite authors from my High School Sci-Fi reading: Robert Heinlein, David Brin, Larry Niven, etc. but Scalzi‘s books (at least the two I’ve read) don’t feel derivative in any negative way. He maintains a good balance between character, story, action, and Sci-Fi elements without letting any of them overshadow the rest. I’ll read the third book soon.

Book Review: City of War

City of WarTitle: City of War

Author: Neil Russel

Genre: Contemporary Thriller

Read: First week August 2010

Summary: Extremely fun read.

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I don’t read too many Thrillers without a Horror/Sci-fi/Fantasy/Supernatural element, but I was introduced to the author through a friend of mine and decided to check his book out. I’m glad I did. This is a roller coaster ride I can only describe as Fletch meets James Bond meets The Big Sleep. A billionaire playboy who happens to be ex-special forces happens to rescue a naked (and gorgeous) kidnapping escapee on the freeway, and things snowball into a globe spanning conspiracy of murder, art forgery and more. It’s fast and fun, but what really sells everything is the know-at-all first person voice of the protagonist. The action is often a little over the top, but his snarky attitude makes everything amusing. Perhaps (like Bond and many other action heros) he is a little too good at what he does, too calm under pressure etc. But it doesn’t really matter because he entertains with every paragraph. Great settings and a plot with a few shocking moments and unexpected changes of direction doesn’t hurt either. A director and well cast lead with the talents to capture the voice could turn this into a great action movie.

Book Review: Old Man’s War

Old Man's WarTitle: Old Man’s War

Author: John Scalzi

Genre: Sci-Fi/Space Opera

Read: Oct 26-27 2010

Summary: Top notch fun! If you liked Avatar and want to see how much better a good Sci-Fi novel can be, read this.

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This novel borrows heavily from classics like Starship Troopers and Forever War, but who cares. It’s great. A flawlessly breathless read from start to finish. Basically it’s about a normal (for the year 2200) 75 year old man who volunteers to leave the sheltered Earth, gets upgraded, and is thrown into the maelstrom of interstellar alien combat. It’s action driven, idea driven, AND character driven. Not that the characters are painted with some kind of world shattering mastery, but they’re good, and likable. The atmosphere and action are all great. I also enjoyed seeing aliens again in my Sci-Fi. By that, I mean weird and tentacled out hostile aliens. I like my aliens alien.

There are also a lot of good newer Sci-Fi ideas packed into the book, plus a healthy dose of classic 60’s-80’s ones that have been nicely updated. I have a few little bones to pick with the author’s vision of the future. Particularly on Earth where things seem to have barely changed. Hell, there are even magazines in a waiting room. We won’t have magazines 20 years from now. In addition, the alien planets seemed to too often have the coincidental breathable atmosphere. This is common across Sci-Fi but always bugs me. The space marines have combat suits, it could just mention the suit dealing with the issue. And several of the aliens liked to eat humans. Now I liked the gruesome touch, but the reality is that alien biology would be way too different. The odds of them having the same amino acids, salts, etc as life on Earth are astronomical. But as I said, I liked Scalzi’s aliens, particularly the weird militant advanced religious nut warrior bugs.

But still, these complaints are just nitpicks. I loved the book. I downloaded the next two sequels already (via Kindle to my iPad). Enough said.

On Writing: Revising, and Waiting

The Darkening DreamOne of the weird and disconcerting things about the revision stage of novel writing is the waiting. For me a revision often goes like this:

1. Receive a bunch of notes about problems or possible improvements for the book.

2. Become briefly depressed (1-2 days) as I ponder how to fix the problems.

2. Cheer up as I create a revision plan with little notes per chapter detailing my grand scheme to fix everything. I try and visualize in my head how the big picture of the story will be affected.

3. Do all the “little changes” that can be done without breaking the book and requiring a full read to fix.

4. Take one by one the bigger changes (including big cuts) and make them, attempting to repair the story as I make the changes, including finding any references in the story that are now inconsistant because of changes. Anytime a scene requires substantial changes I need to make the changes and then do at least one full sweep read of the scene to pickup typos and the like. Within each of these changes it often involves moving around passages and cutting stuff first, then blending in the changes and repairing the loose ends. I think of this as the surgery stage.

5. Sometimes certain “global” changes which involve small changes across a lot of the book are left out of the surgery. An example of this would be adding a pervasive trait or line of thought to a major character. For example in one draft I added a dead little brother into the history of the protagonist and needed various little references here and there.. These are things that can only be easily done in the context of a full read.

6. Start reading at the beginning. As I go through each scene correct any errors, line edit, revise, tighten etc. Insert in any changes that are part of large sequential changes, particularly things that involve complex reveals of information back and forth across the entire novel. If the changes in a particular scene are big, do a sweep read. An interesting note here is that one’s style evolves. Even simple things like how I use line breaks, or most particularly my style of dialog tagging change over time. The full pass is a good place to “modernize” scenes and try and bring them all up to the latest style.

7. After finishing the whole pass do line edit and compression passes on a few scenes that might have felt “fat” but for some reason I didn’t compress during the big sweep.

This whole process is very intense and I tend to do it in a big manic burst of energy. Then I have a new draft. Given that I’ve read the book so many times, I’m usually out of new ideas for improvement at that point. If I had any, I would’ve put them into the draft. I’m unlikely to get any more until someone else jogs my brain via feedback. I’m a maniac workaholic so I’d prefer to work steadily on the book until it’s done. Totally done. But at this point until I get some feedback the only thing I could actually do is read scenes over and over and “tune” the prose. However, If I just completed a big full read this is counter productive. One only gets so many reads of any scene before it becomes very difficult to actually pay attention, so doing too many back to back isn’t a good idea. Plus, what you can’t tell after big changes and cuts is how exactly the overall reveal of information in the book works for a new reader. As the author one intrinsically knows too much about everything. You need a virgin reader for that.

So I have to send the book out for comments and wait. I send it to my professional freelance editors, and I try and solicit as many friends and family readers as is reasonable for the draft with the goal of getting just a hand full of decent commentaries back.

I hate waiting. So I try to keep myself busy with other things. Catching up on my reading. Learning to Blog. Updating my synopses and/or query letter (mind numbing!). Searching the web for possible agents. All this is dull and not nearly as creatively rewarding as working on the book itself. What I really want to do is find out what might be wrong with it and fix it until it’s done.

But it takes at least two, usually more, weeks to get comments back. Arrgh! I’m used to video games where everything is done NOW NOW NOW. Let’s not even talk about the archaic mid-century operating speed of the traditional publishing biz — I’ll save that for another time — the only things slower than that are French silk factories, municipal construction, and the US PTO.

What I really SHOULD do is work on the outline for my next book. I do a bit of this, but it’s hard to jump full tilt into the early stages of another gigantic creative endeavor when what I really want to do is finish the one on my plate. I used to have this exact same feeling after we’d ship the US version of a Crash Bandicoot or Jak & Daxter game. I’d sit around waiting for the external QA department to approve the Gold Master, or the foreign groups to return their last tiny localization changes. Meanwhile, I could neither go on vacation nor devote proper creative energy to the next project.

Maybe it’s just my hyper kinetic “finish it!” type personality, or maybe it’s just part of the process.

Book Review: The Passage

The PassageTitle: The Passage

Author: Justin Cronin

Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror

Read: Late June 2010

Summary: Excellent.

Nne of this year’s top new vampire entries. It’s an odd book, long, and broken into three parts, but good. The first third is set more or less in the present and deals with how a viral epidemic that turns people into nearly indestructible vampire-like creatures gets loose and destroys the world. The writing is good and this section is a bit of an oddity in that the plot itself is minimal, but padded out with almost gratuitous backstory on nearly every character. Bit players that we meet in the gas station for one page get five pages of life story flashback. All these people, lovingly details, die quickly. Oddly, it works and is a compelling read. However, it makes me scratch my head as all the standard writing advice I’ve been given by editors, agents, and the like would’ve been to cut all these backstories. In fact, they certainly would’ve told me that the entire first third of the book is backstory, and the proper place to start was far later. At a certain level they are correct, because there is only one character — and an odd one at that — who crosses from this long prelude into the main two thirds of the novel.

The middle third of the book takes place 100 years later and totally kicks ass. This was some of the best Sci-fi/horror I’ve read in years. It’s post apocalyptic, taking place in this one compound somewhere in the California desert. They are under continual siege by vampires, and their numbers are dwindling. Their entire life and society is organized around survival, but slow attrition of their numbers is the only thing in their future. The Road Warrior meets I-don’t-know-what feel of this section is awesome. Cronin does a fantastic job of world building here, and the specific animalistic vampires (a bit reminiscent of I am Legend) is great. In some way’s it feels more like a Zombie apocalypse because it has that feeling of instant-death-at-any-second.

In part three, these same characters are forced out of their little sanctuary into the big bad world. This part is still good, but does a little shark jumping and borrows very heavily from things like the Stand, etc. I didn’t mind, but the ending felt a little forced and just didn’t quiet sustain the promise of the amazing middle section.

Still, the overall novel was excellent. Flawed, but the middle part was so great, and the first and third sections enjoyable enough, to make it one of the better books I’ve read in a while.

Book Review: Personal Demons

Personal DemonsTitle: Personal Demons

Author: Lisa Desrochers

Genre: YA supernatural romance

Read: Oct 20 2010

Summary: Detested it.

The premise of this book is that a demon and an angel are both vying for the love (and soul) of the same high school girl. This I don’t mind. The execution however…  Let us start with voice and character. The book is told in staccato alternating first person from the girl and the demon’s POVs. The girl is written in currently-in-vogue snarky-boy-crazy voice which is frankly repulsive and (hopefully) not even accurate in all but the most brainless products of mass media consumption. All she can think about is that whichever guy is in front of her looks hot in his jeans. The demon was less annoying but even more ridiculous. He’s supposed to be a 4000 year-old denizen of Hell out to corrupt the souls of the innocent and he comes off like a self involved High Schooler. At no point does he actually BEHAVE in any way particularly evil. He shows no particular long term perspective, but instead just has the hots for the girl. There is no real thought about what it might mean for God and the Devil to actually  meaningfully over someone’s heart, or even what it means to be a good or evil person. The good vs. bad is couched in terms of which boy the girl sleeps with. The high level premise is fine, but the book as written just makes no sense except on the most superficial level, and most importantly the characters are cardboard cutouts serving only the voice and premise — so who cares about them. This makes Twilight seem a work of art, and is exactly the kind of pseudo-religious story that I wrote my novel in counterpoint to.

Book Review: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

The Adoration of Jenna FoxTitle: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Author: Mary E. Pearson

Genre: YA light sci-fi

Read: Mid Oct 2010

Summary: Liked it a lot.

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I’ve been disappointed by a lot of the contemporary Young Adult novels I’ve been reading and this was a pleasant surprise. Told in first person present tense this is the story of a girl who awakes from a mysterious accident with almost no memory. She doesn’t know what to make of what her “parents” tell her and the videos and images of a life she doesn’t remember. It’s very light Science Fiction, set in a near future with very little prose-time spent on explanation of tech stuff — which is fine. It’s just very well written and the point of view engaging. The characters feel real, and you invest some emotion in them. At a certain core level this is all it takes. For many young readers the concepts of deconstructed identity might be novel — for me as a sci-fi reader who likes that theme this book wasn’t really about the plot. But there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just a good book and an easy read. I liked the voice and found it pleasantly free of forced attitude.