David Dubrow

Author

Book Review: Graham Masterton’s Ghost Music

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I’ve been a huge fan of Graham Masterton since the early 1990’s.  Two of his novels, Night Warriors and Flesh and Blood, occupy prized spots on my dresser, so I can see them every day.  Like most writers who’ve had long, successful careers, some of his books have been great, some good, and some not so good.

Unfortunately, Ghost Music wasn’t so good.  This is why I didn’t enjoy it:

  • Graham’s American Problem: There’s a persistent problem with the novels Masterton sets in the U.S.: they’re self-evidently written by someone unfamiliar with American idiom, customs, and culture.  He’s typically got very snappy, witty dialogue, which is great, but occasionally English expressions like “Who’s X when he’s at home?” pop in when Americans speak to each other, and it takes you out of the story and reminds you who’s writing it.  His attempts to immerse the reader in American culture simply fail most of the time, because when he’s not trying too hard, he’s not trying enough.  I just wish he’d stop it.  American horror fans will buy books set in Poland and the U.K. if he writes them.  This problem was very much evident in Ghost Music.
  • Stupid Protagonist: Another major criticism of the novel is that the protagonist was an absolute idiot from start to finish.  While I understand that authors who work through traditional publishers often don’t get to choose the titles of their novels, it makes for a frustrating reading experience to read about a man who’s obviously seeing ghosts everywhere but has no idea that he’s seeing ghosts.  He’s even screwing one who has the uncanny ability to shatter glass with her screams of delight at climax.  It’s only near the end that he figures out that the people who appear and disappear, are dead one day and alive the next, are actually…wait for it…ghosts.  The protagonist also makes a number of very strange decisions, all of which make no sense but are vital to move the plot forward.  This is sloppy writing.  It shows a lack of respect for the reader.
  • Bad Bad Guys: There was needless brutality in the way certain people met their end: a boy has his eyes glued shut as part of the torture he endures before dying, and a young girl is literally sewed to a mattress that is later sunk into the sea (we’ll ignore how the latter can possibly be done for the purposes of storytelling).  The impetus for this brutality involves a hastily thrown-together denouement with illegal organ harvesting in the Third World and a mafia-like antagonist.

Across the board not one of his best, but I did finish it.  Two stars.

Final note: When he’s on his game, Graham Masterton is extraordinary.  I’ll take him over Stephen King any day. Don’t take this one review as indicative of his entire oeuvre.

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Kathleen Hale the Stalker: 4 Things to Consider

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Kathleen Hale is a writer who, after having gotten a bad review on her book, stalked the reviewer online, in person, and on the phone.  Hale wrote about her experiences in The Guardian, and the story has elicited a great deal of comment in both writer and reviewer circles.  As usual, I’m a bit late to the party, but I figured I’d make my thoughts known anyway.

  1. There’s an expression that I love when it comes to commentary on situations like these: moral preening.  Or, if you prefer, burnishing your moral bona-fides.  In short, you should get no points for taking the moral stand that’s self-evidently right, even if many people have taken the opposite position.  There’s no bravery in pointing out an obviously wrong thing and saying, “Hey, you shouldn’t do that.”  With that in mind, it’s clear that Hale was completely batshit crazy and shouldn’t have stalked the reviewer.  She shouldn’t be trusted with sharp objects, she’s an entitled lunatic, etc. etc.  We know that, so let’s move on.
  2. This is an interesting piece, if only because it hits the most overwrought high points and completely forgets how unbelievably small the respective author and reviewer pools truly are compared to the population of actual readers.  The vast majority of readers don’t give a shit outside of the drama Hale’s story has created, which is itself interesting reading.  If all the book bloggers/reviewers went on strike, people would still buy and read books.  Even indie books.  Note also terms like “systematic devaluation of female voices” in the actual piece and comments from readers that include “it all seems to me to be part and parcel of a trend toward silencing women”.  This from an opinion piece that does more than just reference a woman writer who stalked a woman reviewer.  If female voices are being devalued, some of the blame must fall upon women, right?  The expression about one’s only tool being a hammer and every problem resembling a nail comes to mind.  If everything’s about women’s issues, nothing’s about women’s issues.  This isn’t about women’s issues.
  3. I care about reviews: most beginning writers do.  Reviews affect business.  Obviously, I only want honest reviews from people who read the book (no moral preening here).  If the book’s great, tell me so.  Tell everyone how great it is so they buy it, too.  However, I ache for the time when none of it will matter so much to me.  It will require a great deal of work to get there, so I just put my head down and write.  When it comes to bad reviews (anything less than 3 stars is a bad review, and even a 3-star review isn’t good), they hurt, but you suck it up and move on.  If the reviewer has something pithy to say, you go back and see if the criticism is valid.  Improve where you can and move on.  One thing, though: I reserve the right to hate you a little because you didn’t like my book.  Just a little.  I won’t act on it.  But it’ll be this thing between us.  And you might have forgotten it, but for me, it’s always there.  For some writers, the hate is bigger.  For some unhinged writers, there’s a need to act on that hate, hence Hale.  
  4. Goodreads is where the dastardly attack on Hale’s good name was perpetrated.  I dislike Goodreads.  Most authors I speak to feel the same way.  It’s tailor-made for the passive-aggressive set, with its context-free rating system that doesn’t require that you’ve read anything further than the blurb to use.  Many Goodreads reviewers love to write long, vicious attack screeds about the books and authors they hate, and these reviewers have gained reader followings for those screeds.  Self-important internet book-tyrants stake out fiefs on Goodreads, and woe to the fool who makes the mistake of expressing a different opinion.  Luckily, Goodreads isn’t representative of the reading population.  Hopefully it isn’t representative of humanity in general.  Like every other form of social media, it’s high school.  It’s small.  It’s not the real world.  But writers have to acknowledge it.  

All the successful writers I respect say the same thing: ignore the reviews.  Write.  Improve.  Market.  Repeat.  It’s what I intend to do.

Right after I check my Amazon writer page to see if anyone else has reviewed my books yet.

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Book Review: The Blue Tent Sky

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I can’t remember where I found the link to Brian Aitken’s Indiegogo site, but I do recall that once I read it, I had to contribute.  His story required it.

The book blurb says, “In 2010 Brian Aitken was sentenced to seven years in prison for possessing firearms he legally owned. He lost everything, including custody of his son, for a crime he did not commit. After spending four months behind bars, Governor Chris Christie demanded his release. This is his story.”

For anyone interested in personal freedom, firearms laws, individual rights, or an inside look at an extremely arbitrary and capricious legal system, this book is a must-read.  The early part of Brian’s story is immediately recognizable: an acrimonious divorce followed by parental alienation, but it soon spirals into a horribly Kafkaesque nightmare culminating in a seven-year prison sentence for the crime of moving one’s lawfully-owned firearms from one residence to another.

While gripping, the book isn’t without its flaws.  Some grammatical mistakes, odd phrasing, and disjointed story-telling occasionally mar the narrative; it needed one last pass with an editor before it went to print.  In addition, there’s a ham-handed marketing effort to make Brian’s story a left vs. right issue, which doesn’t fit.  The American left doesn’t like guns and wants to outlaw private ownership of them, yes, but this case was about the typical unthinking gun-grabbing that’s part and parcel of northeastern liberalism, not a true political effort.  An overzealous prosecutor and disgustingly biased judge wanted to make an example of Brian not because he was a conservative, but because he dared to own guns in their state.

Brian had been gored by two bulls: America’s awful family court system (which treats all fathers like disposable potential abusers) and New Jersey’s contradictory, even senseless firearms laws.  I can’t imagine how terrible it must be to have one’s own son ripped away like Brian’s, but to be sentenced to prison on top of that for not having done anything illegal is unthinkable.  Despite this, Brian treated the subject matter with admirable grace.

The story hits its nadir with Brian’s chilling account of county jail, followed by prison.  As appalling as the experience was, the injustice of it made it even worse, no doubt, and I needed a Silkwood shower after reading it.

Whether or not you can ever see yourself in Brian’s shoes, what happened to him was a terrible injustice.  Buy his book.  Read it.  And stay out of New Jersey if you legally own a firearm.

Four out of five stars.

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Book Review: Dune: The Butlerian Jihad

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It gives me no pleasure at all to write a review like this.  I’m intimately familiar with what it takes to write a novel with multiple characters, attempting to describe events that are epic in scope.  And I understand that not every book is going to appeal to every reader.  You can decide that you don’t like a book, but acknowledge that it’s a difference of personal taste, not the book’s quality.  Nevertheless, Dune: The Butlerian Jihad is an objectively bad book that should never have been foisted upon the reading public.

I tried extremely hard to like it.  It promised to describe a very interesting period in the Dune universe: what caused humanity to throw away advanced computer technology in such a way as to refer to it as a jihad?

Well, you can keep asking, because this answer is terrible.  There’s nothing about it that’s worth your time.  Here are some of the low points:

1) The chapter introductions are trite and without insight.  Take this chapter introduction from DTBJ (Dune: The Butlerian Jihad): “When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and learn from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind.”  Not particularly penetrating, that.  Why bother reading the rest of the book after that?  Contrast it with this chapter intro from Dune: “There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man – with human flesh.”  That tells you something.  You can agree with it or not, but it’s a great insight into what Paul-Muad’Dib thought.  There’s none of that in DTBJ.  The characters and plotting likewise lack depth.

Sandworm: “Ow.”

2) The writing tells you everything without bothering to go through the whole rigmarole of showing you anything.  An example: “He was a serious young man, prone to honesty and with a tendency to see things in black and white….Much admired by his superiors, Xavier had been promoted quickly; equally respected by his soldiers, he was the sort of trusted man they would follow into battle.”  Oh.  Well, great.  I don’t suppose there’s any way the writers could have demonstrated these traits for us in the dialogue or action of the book.  Instead, the reader is beaten over the head with this kind of information.  Clumsy.  Terribly clumsy.  The writers don’t give us the opportunity to judge the characters on their own merits, and instead tell us what to think.

3) The best parts are glossed over, and the story is mundane.  Evil brains-in-a-jar cyborgs called cymeks begin the novel by attacking a planet.  These cymeks have names like Ajax, Agamemnon, and Tlaloc, but don’t act like their namesakes, and there’s little backstory described or told about their origins.  We get ugly little infodumps about them like cat crottes in a litterbox instead.  None of that intricate weaving of history and current action that we’d come to love from Frank Herbert’s work.  The reasons for voluntarily relinquishing one’s own humanity go entirely unexplored here.

DTBJ was a New York Times bestseller, published by Macmillan.  And it’s awful.  Tell me again how self-published books are the scourge of literary quality, and that the more self-published crap gets out there, the less likely it is great, properly-vetted books will be read.  The gatekeepers missed this one.  Big time.

I got 11% in and had to stop reading.  Don’t do what I did and buy it.  Learn from my mistake.  Save yourself.

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Book Review: Antediluvian by R.M. Huffman

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R.M. Huffman’s research, writing, and attention to detail take familiar fantasy elements and transform them into something extraordinary in this pre-Flood adventure novel, one that is definitely worth your time.  It’s a fascinating story about the world-that-was described so sparingly in the Book of Genesis, where morning mists covered the Earth in lieu of rain, Watcher angels gave into lust to lay with human women, and dragon-like sauropods were used as beasts of burden.  The offspring of these human-angel couplings, the giant Nephilim, are major figures here, as are the more recognizable Biblical characters of Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah.

The narrative begins on a small scale, as the descendants of Adam, living in post-Fall Eden, are brought into cultural (and sometimes physical) conflict with the sons of Cain, living in the massive, decadent city of Enoch.  It explodes from there into a larger story rife with horrific murders, shocking betrayals, and even a tragic seduction.  Noah, the protagonist, is forced by events to move away from the more pedestrian role of farmer and architect into freedom fighter and prophet.  
The lavish descriptions, speculative world-building, and vivid battle scenes make this a world you can look forward to visiting again in the upcoming sequel.  Four stars.

R.M. Huffman can be found on his website: http://antediluvianworld.com.

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