Sara Gruen

Author Rating: A

Water For Elephants (read 2011) Recommended

Jacob Jankowski, a 90-year-old man, tells the story of what happened after his parents are killed in a car crash, he’s forced to leave veterinary school and accidentally joins the circus.

 

Tad Williams

Author Rating: D

Otherland: The Happiest Dead Boy In The World (read 7/24/12) Don’t Bother

This novelette published as one of five by various authors in the Legends II anthology is so bad that I was only able to manage one page before I gave it up as a completely bad job.

 

Anne McCaffrey

Author Rating: D

Pegasus In Space (read 12/7/11) Avoid

I love science fiction, and bad science fiction makes me very irritable.  Anne McCaffrey has managed to irritate me very much indeed.  It is doubly irritating because she has been so highly recommended by so many for so long and there has been so much high praise written about her after her recent death, but, in my opinion, it is all completely undeserved.  Her writing is terrible, her plots are juvenile, her characters are childish and the internal consistency is nonexistent.

If you value good writing, well conceived story lines, do not bother with the writings of Anne McCaffrey.

Beyond Between (read 7/24/12) Don’t Bother

This novelette published as one of five by various authors in the Legends II anthology did nothing to redeem my bad opinion of Anne McCaffrey but only reinforced it. Awful, awful writing. I just do not understand how McCaffrey has managed to get published at all, much less attract the readership she apparently has.

 

Patricia Cornwell

Author Rating: D

Isle of Dogs (read 10/20/11) AVOID

Wow, does Patricia Cornwell have something really big she’s using to blackmail someone at Putnam to get them to publish her books? One reviewer at Amazon wonders whether “we have a case of an imperious, arrogant author who has cheesed off her publishers enough that they’re letting her readers see what she’s really like?”

This novel is supposed to have been a change for Cornwell from serial killer/suspense to what the San Francisco Examiner describes as “the world of black humor.” They were a little too generous in suggesting that she “nearly conquers it,” but Carl Hiaasen doesn’t need to move over because Cornwell won’t be keeping him company. Cornwell writes at about the level of a fifth-grader and wouldn’t recognize humor if it ran her over.

Let me give you an example:

“I thought we were doing our best to play down this pirate business,” the governor seemed to remember. [“Seemed to remember”? WTF?] “Didn’t I order Superintendent Hammer not to release any statements to the press about anything without our approving it first?” [Could dialogue be any more awkward?]

“You certainly did. And so far, we’re managing to keep the sensational details out of the media.”

“You don’t suppose Trooper Truth [give me a fucking break] intends to keep blabbing about our pirate problem on the Internet, do you?”

“Yes, sir, “Trader replied as if he knew this for a fact. “We can rest assured his website is going to open a can of worms, because by all appearances, it’s an inside job and I fear your administration could be blamed if things really get ugly.”

“You might be right. I get blamed for most things,” the governor confessed as his stomach rumbled and his intestines lurched into activity like worms suddenly exposed to daylight. He wished Trader had not mentioned a can of worms.

Cornwell received money for writing that crap. There truly is no justice.

Governor Crimm picked up his nineteenth-century magnifying glass, which was English and made of ivory. Peering through the lens, he made out enough of the essay’s contents to get interested and slightly offended.

Really, Putnam?

The only mystery here is how this crap got published.

 

Edward Marston

Author Rating: D

The Roaring Boy (read 2/15/10) AVOID

Edward Marston is the author of numerous mysteries set in the Elizabethan period and featuring Nicholas Bracewell. Based on having read this one — an insult to the reader’s intelligence — I would recommend avoiding this author.

The story starts out reasonably enough but soon devolves into pure stupidity. The characters are neither true to the period nor to human nature in general. Given the number and nature of the typographical errors, it would seem that the editor and proofreader didn’t see any point in putting any effort to clean it up.

 

Margaret George

Author Rating: D

The Memoirs of Cleopatra (read 1/7/10) AVOID

What a huge disappointment! And when I say “huge,” I’m talking 957 pages. Earlier I had attempted Colin Falconer‘s appalling When We Were Gods: A Novel of Cleopatra. Wanting to find a better book about the Queen of the Nile, I looked at recommendations over at Amazon. This book was described as being well written and historically accurate.

How bad is this book? There were times that I feared my eyes would literally roll up into my head. I managed to force my way through two-thirds of turgid, often extremely boring prose before I finally gave it up as a serious waste of time.

George’s Cleopatra is certainly more intelligent than Falconer’s but only marginally so. Periods during which Caesar or Marc Anthony are absent go on and on and on with Cleopatra doing nothing but pine and whine about their absence. If these sections had been shortened, the book would be no more than 500 pages. If the sex scenes had been shortened, the book would be about 100 pages.

Reading this book is truly a waste of your time. You can learn more useful information about Cleopatra VII at Wikipedia than by submitting yourself to suffering through the truly excruciating writing of Margaret George.

 

Bill Pronzini

Author Rating: C+

Deadfall (read 12/20/09) Meh

Reading this book was like examining an ancient record of a lost time — the early to mid 1980s. As I got ready to write this review, I did a search for any earlier post mentioning the author and discovered he was already on my banished list as a result of his short story in a very bad anthology of very bad mystery writers. This particular book wasn’t so awful that I stopped reading before the end, but it being relatively short was a significant factor in the decision to continue.

Apparently Pronzini wrote a series of “Nameless Detective” mysteries, this being number sixteen. Nameless is on a stakeout, waiting for some deadbeats to get home so he can repossess their car, when he hears two gunshots coming from a nearby home. He sees a figure running away and, upon entering the house, discovers the victim who he later learns is a gay man named Leonard whose wealthy brother had died falling from a cliff months earlier. Leonard’s “house mate,” who believes the two deaths are related, hires him to find the killer.

Pronzini treats homosexuals as if they are another species. He has no understanding of human sexuality. “Confirmed homosexuals couldn’t be seduced by a woman, of course.”

He is equally clueless about women, ascribing to Nameless’ girlfriend the kind of stupid responses to things that one expects from a man who sees women as a separate species as well.

What also becomes clear in reading this is how much Pronzini disapproves of pot smoking and is one of those misinformed people who insist that it is a “gateway” to heroin.

I’m giving Pronzini a C+ because, if you can ignore the cluelessness and can tolerate caricatures instead of characters, the story itself is plausible.

 

Robert Holdstock

Author Rating: D

Celtika (read 12/15/09) forget about it

This is the first of Holdstock’s Merlin Codex series. The story covers the period before Arthur. Seven hundred years after Jason‘s death, Merlin discovers that Medea had not murdered Jason’s sons but had moved them forward in time. But Jason is not dead, he is still aboard his ship the Argonaut in the bottom of a frozen lake. Merlin rescues him and they set out to find Jason’s sons. It is through this adventure that Merlin first meets Urtha, an ancestor of Arthur, setting the stage for Holdstock’s version of the Arthurian Legend.

I was a bit impatient with the first third of the book but I think that is more my fault than the author’s. I have always found Merlin to be the more interesting character, and Holdstock does a pretty good job of bringing him to life.

The Iron Grail (read 1/18/10) forget about it

Merlin is in Alba (England) and finds Urtha’s stronghold, Taurovinda, has been taken over by ghosts of the dead and not-yet-born while Urtha and Merlin were off avenging the murder of Urtha’s family and to help Jason find his oldest son. Everyone eventually gets back to Taurovinda, the ghosts are cleared out and an expedition is mounted into Ghostland to find Jason’s second son.

The editing could have been much better. There are swaths that are confusing and/or contradictory, and too much that is repetitive. It would have been better had the first two books been combined and the filler left out.

The Broken Kings (read 2/9/10) forget about it

Reality finally came home to roost by page 65 of this, the third book in Holdstock’s “Merlin Coded.” Reading these novels is a complete waste of your time. Endless bullshit that signifies nothing, full of seemingly endless contradiction so that I could take no more and have thrown it over as a bad job.

Holdstock’s Merlin is unengaging, the action so slow and plodding that I couldn’t manage more than three or four pages before passing out.

If you like Arthur/Merlin stories, I highly recommend Peter David‘s very humorous series. Now there’s a “living mythmaker.” Holdstock? Meh.

 

Christopher G. Moore

Author Rating: D

Do not confuse this execrable writer with the recommended writer Christopher Moore.

The Risk of Infidelity Index (read 12/8/09) AVOID

I guess the publisher was desperate to find someone willing to say something good about this book to print on the jacket so they looked to another author, T. Jefferson Parker, who damages whatever reputation he might have by declaring that this awful piece of trash is “taut, spooky, intelligent and beautifully written.”

This is a horrible, badly written book that no one should waste their time with. I actually only managed to suffer through to about page 80 when I decided that I had really done nothing so bad in my life that I deserved to suffer through to the end.

I got the book from the library thinking it was by Christopher Moore, a writer who is actually good. It is unfortunate that they have the same name, only distinguished by the hack’s use of the middle initial G (to my mind, “Godawful”). This book could not have been more of a disappointment.

 

Colin Falconer

Author Rating: D

When We Were Gods: A Novel of Cleopatra (read 11/24/09) AVOID!

Where to start with how dreadful this book is?

Since the author starts out in the acknowledgment with thanking his editors, perhaps his editors are a good place for me to start. I don’t know what actual services Ayesha Pande and Rachel Kahan provided the author, but it had little to do with actual editing of this book.

Just short of a full printed page comes the first editing oversight — “his” instead of “her” — which a previous reader had corrected. Things go downhill from there. There are many instances in the first 75 pages of misplaced punctuation and confused sentence structure.

I will concede that I have only read to about page 75 but anyone who reads any further has a stronger stomach for stupidity than I have.

When things happen is so confused and contradictory that it’s hard to fix your place in time. The heading for chapter one indicates “fifty-one years before the birth of Jesus Christ.” There are no date headings for chapters two, three or four. Chapter five indicates “forty-eight years before the birth of Jesus Christ.”

Wouldn’t you think that three years had passed? You’d be wrong. Maybe. It’s impossible to know.

The character Cleopatra indicates, in conversation with another character, the passage of one year.

This is a major irritation. It is impossible to know with certainty how old Cleopatra is supposed to be. At chapter one she is 18, but how old is she at chapter five? Nineteen? Twenty-one? Who knows?

But that’s not the only time issue here. The author rambles on with general description but then morphs into narration of a specific event. When did this event occur relative to the last event which had been described? Days? Weeks? Months? Who knows?

Falconer claims to have done “research.” In fact, the back jacket blurb claims, “He travels widely to research his novels.” I wonder whether this “research” wasn’t just intimate weekends with his two editors and his agent, perhaps in Egypt.

The way the character of Cleopatra — central and most important to the book — is set forth is ahistorical. She wonders frequently about “finding love.” WTF?

She is presented as spunky and educated but almost completely passive except when she is literally sucking Caesar’s cock. WTF?

Another ongoing irritation is that a map is provided, not printed in the inside cover by a creative publisher, but on two pages before the text begins, presumably as an aid to the reader. Turns out, not so much. Only two out of every ten locations mentioned are indicated on the map.

I persisted as far as I did because my interest in Egyptian history and the actual Cleopatra had been piqued, but it became obvious that there is nothing historically reliable about this book. It is actually nothing more than a bad romance novel.