Geek Syndicate
in whether or not I recommend this book, you can move along. I give it 1/5. If you want to know why I rate it so low, read on. Now, I’m not going to rake over everything I disliked about the book. It would be boring for you and way too time-consuming for me. There are some elements I appreciated (the Shadow Men, the “wiggle-room” Cade finds in his Oath when faced with corruption, one or two of the action sequences) but they are severely outweighed by the rest. My main issues come under the headings of Taste, Consistency and Quality. Taste – There are true horrors in the world, perpetrated by real people. Taking a real atrocity and giving it a secret history is exploitative and crass. It demeans the victims and reduces the web of events behind it to simplistic rubbish. In the first few pages, Osama Bin Laden is revealed to be a lizard-man , who didn’t even believe in God (gasp). It’s childish in conception and jingoistic in implication. Stick it in a subversive comedy like Team America: World Police and you might just get away with it, but there’s no self mockery here. To be clear, this is an action scene in the prologue, not a major plot twist, but it’s indicative of the level and taste of exploitation throughout. Consistency – There are so many ways this book doesn’t add up: the monsters are more reptile than Deep One, character motivations seem stitched together to serve the plot and science isn’t even considered. Throughout the text there are many throwaway references to other works of fiction (and films), scattered throughout to give this world a greater sense of scale. It was quite a nice touch to link The Thing with At The Mountains Of Madness – both of which contain shape-shifting aliens, but including such oblique things as The Shadow and A Nightmare On Elm Street (along with innumerable Lovecraftian nods) adds nothing to the book. If anything it just reminds the reader of other, better stories. In a bizarre choice, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is dismissed in the text as a work of fiction, whilst the reader is made to infer that most of his other stories are historical fact within this world… Quality – This is not a well written book. The characters have a paucity of internal life and fundamentally do nothing but their jobs. Fragments of personality are thrown out there, but the focus is always on plot momentum and jabbing those adrenaline buttons. There’s no flare in imagination or prose, ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????U???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????U????????????????????e?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????%???????????
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