I just spent my free morning trudging gamely and willingly to the end of this novel, which attests to its rubbernecky paint-by-numbers appeal.
While tI just spent my free morning trudging gamely and willingly to the end of this novel, which attests to its rubbernecky paint-by-numbers appeal.
While the novel is about as literary as the latest Dean Koontz novel it does what it does very well. Much of its fascination for me was in the effluvial, nearly loving detail of what might under certain circumstances come out of human bodies. Blood from slit throats, blood from bullet-shot guts, blood from the stump after a limb is chewed off by a bear, pus from infected wounds, feces from not only the usual place but also from lanced abdominal abcesses, vomit of all textures and colors, "jism" leaking from various places, and let's not forget a child's tooth imbedded in the bad guy's shoulder. Festering there.
There is exactly enough of everything here on the page to keep the story going, and no more. So you have a couple of pages of a violent rape to establish the bad-guy's cred at the beginning. You have just enough backstory to establish that the protag is a just-enough-flawed hero. You get three pages of living among the "Esquimeaux" to establish a redemption arc. The hero saves himself with a handy, plot-useful trick that was also featured in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and more recently The Revenant movie. Etcetera.
Masterfully superficial storytelling. I enjoyed reading it....more
Loading...
