Tag Archives: penguin

The Perfect Poison

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by Amanda Quick (Jayne Ann Krentz)
2009 GP Putnam (Penguin)

First sentence: Lucinda stopped a few feet away from the dead man, trying to ignore the fierce undercurrents of tension that raged through the elegant library.
Clichés in three successive sentences, written while the author was eating a frozen lemonade:cool and composed, as cold as ice, chill her to the bone
Pairs well with: oatmeal, dry toast, iceberg lettuce, lite beer, unsalted nuts, dental appointments and broken marriages

Jayne Ann Krentz needs to spend more time creating characters and less time writing 122 shitty novels. Krentz is another author of “genre romance”, a genre we last met with Spellbound by Patricia Simpson. But rather than being shitty and charming, this is just shitty and crappy.

In three pages she introduces the following characters:

  • a Scotland Yard Inspector who is stout, cheerful, has a voluminous mustache and a “psychical gift” for noticing small clues at a murder scene
  • the “severe-looking” spinster sister named Hannah Rathbone
  • a handsome man named Hamilton Fairborn, with his “well-modeled” jaw
  • a coterie of offended Victorian ladies

I wasn’t sure if I was reading a novel or playing a game of Parker Brothers Clue. It seems Jayne Ann Krentz gets her novel ideas from watching Masterpiece Theatre knockoffs on the Mexican PBS (which is likely acronymed “BSP” or “SBP”).

Krentz has published six to seven thousand novels (the exact number is not known by modern science) under seven different pseudonyms, in part because she is so embarrassed about everything she writes, and in part because she has killed six other authors, all of them shitty, and assumed their identity. The editor of her page on Wikipedia (who is really Krentz working under the pseudonym “James Patterson”) points out that “Krentz created the futuristic romance subgenre, and further expanded the boundaries of the genre in 1996 with Amaryllis, the first paranormal futuristic romantic suspense novel”. Paranormal indeed.

I considered suicide once for every verb in the first three pages. Luckily shit hardly happened or I would be dead right now.

Other reviews: Jandy’s Reading Room, Working Girl Reviews, Penelope’s Romance Reviews, More Vikings

(Support this site by purchasing this shitty book through one of the links below.)

Zero History

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by William Gibson
2010 GP Putnam’s Sons (Penguin)

First sentence: Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that has always been black, when she’d first know this city.
Idiotic clauses (see below): Glyphed in Prussian blue…a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors…its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic faun.
You will enjoy this if you are also a fan of: eating your boogers

Perhaps I am too dumb to read William Gibson. I know what all these words mean, but they don’t fit together. It’s as if William Gibson chopped up a thesaurus with a hatchet and hammered the pieces together to make a novel. Every time I come across one of these clauses, like, “multiply flapped and counterintuitively buckled” I wait for a light to go on in my esoteric brain, the part that enjoys Baudrillard and jazz (I don’t enjoy jazz but I pretend to like it for all the jazz pussy), but instead I just groan and get sleepy. By the second page, I was in a coma.

It shared a richly but soberly paneled foyer with whatever occupied the other, westernmost, half of the building.

William Gibson, you are trying too hard. Clever, richly-appointed prose has a place, but you give your reader’s imagination no room to expand. You fill out every passage with stumbling blocks like, “Japanese herringbone Gore-Tex” and “one might have ridden a horse without having to duck to clear the lintel”. Every time you write something, your reader has to think about it. If this were a poem, it would be perfect, because we know it’s going to be over by the end of the page. But this goes on for 401 more pages! And besides being an obstacle course to read, I can safely estimate that at least 200 pages of this shitty book are unnecessary filler, which means you skimped on story.

Go back and read Hemingway. He wrote prose like this:

I woke up with a headache and took a drink. I farted. It burned. Then I beat my wife. She cried.

It’s simple, it tells a story, there’s implied tension, emotion, even humor (especially the part where he beat his wife — what a clown!). And best of all it has no confusing speedbumps like, “the floor plan gave evidence of hesitation”. You don’t have to write exactly like Hemingway, but there’s probably a happy medium.

And lastly, I don’t see why people make such a big deal about you inventing the word “cyberspace”. I’ve never said the word “cyberspace” in my whole life except when I was talking about William Gibson and his shitty books.

Other reviews: Mostly Fiction, Iceberg Ink, Big Dumb Object, City of Tongues

(Support this site by purchasing this shitty book through one of the links below.)