John Grisham: Let's Give Old White Guys Who Look at Child Porn a Break

(In case the above link doesn't work, here it is again:

http://gawker.com/john-grisham-lets-give-old-white-guys-who-look-at-chil-1646964144?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow )

Never touching another one of your books, Grisham. Ever again. 

Every single 'author' on this list has earned a place on my list of Badly Behaving Authors and any of the works I do decide to read, I will rely on pirated copies to do so.

http://five-report.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-fake-review-report.html

*sighs*

I wanted to love this book.  The characters were great and well-developed- you could identify and if not identify, you could at least root for them.  You will become interested in what becomes of them.  BUT... and this is a great big BUT... there is a lot lacking...

First of all, there were a couple chapters with named characters that came out of nowhere... and you quickly learned they were going nowhere.  Their whole purpose was to die, without adding a damn thing to the story.  Look Mr. Author, we know what we are reading... by the blurb, by the picture on the cover, by the descriptions of the zombies and the sheer multitude of zombies... we get the fact that MANY people died and became zombies.  These chapters are little more than filler to boost your word count.  A decent editor would have told you to cut them and a good author would have heeded their advice.

Second... I'll take issue with the blurb of this book... Father Xavier did not forsake his vows at the beginning of this novel.  I would suggest a little more research if you are going keep Father Xavier around.  Of course, by the last sentence in this book, you have him most likely taking a shotgun blast to his chest (or head)...  all because he was shivering after swimming in water so cold that he had just a few moments earlier considered using to commit suicide... 

That leads me to my third and final point... great story and I would be willing to overlook the faux pas of including many pages that had no bearing on the story, and the lack of knowledge about the Church as it relates to one of the main protagonists, except for the fact that the story just stops.  On the 290th page, the story stops, no conclusions- not even to a few sub-plot arcs... the only conclusions is death for characters. This is a zombie novel, I get it, and that would be fine for some of them, but I feel short-changed.  This is a perfect example of an author more interested in selling books and the almighty dollar than telling a story.  Give your readers a couple hundred pages, hook them and then demand more money for more story... yeah... no thanks.

I am hooked enough to continue... but with a catch.  I will 'buy' the sequels, but I will read them quickly and then return them.  In the past, I have angrily railed against Amazon for allowing such shenanigans, but I will not do so again.  I will take full advantage.

 Synopsis: (Amazon)

He used to be someone. He used to be in pictures. 

Until he was convicted of murdering his wife and condemned to a life sentence in a psychiatric prison, Mike McKnight was a movie star. A real, live action hero. But the mysterious circumstances surrounding his beloved wife's death pointed a damning finger at just one person: him. He was tried by a world that hated him. He was convicted by a jury who never doubted his guilt. He was discarded and forgotten, locked away by a society that moved on. 

At least until the zombies showed up. 

From a drugged stupor, he emerges into a world that has crumbled and where mankind is on the verge of elimination. He is suddenly thrust into a nightmare of epic proportions when the dead rise as a brutal and terrifying plague on the world of the living. In a landscape littered with post-apocalyptic terrors, Mike and a handful of survivors battle humans and zombies alike, fleeing headlong through danger and despair. 

Over the hellscape of a dying city, to the doubtful retreat of the mountainous countryside, Mike fights to stay alive in a world of the dead, recover his memories, and retrieve a cure to the most threatening plague the world has ever known. 

  Author's Site: Bryan James
  Publisher: self-published
  Purchase: Amazon
  Reviewed For: Purchased via Amazon for my Kindle

Misanthrope's Assessment:

It was a fun read.  Well written, adventurous zombie novel.  I did find that the 'twist' was far to easy to figure out, had it figured out in the first chapter, so that when it was finally revealed, eh... meh about sums up my reaction.  Then, the author just stops.  Like he got bored, or decided that most likely other readers would feel as I did, with the 'meh', so he tried to hook them into buying the next story.

I will not be purchasing any more of this series, and I am unlikely to even sample any of this author's other wares.  If he has any. 

This was a quickie fill-in book which I've had on my shelf for a while; it finally made its way to the top. When I originally picked it up wherever I picked it up, I thought it would be a brief memoir of some sort - but what it actually is is a collection of a number of the one-to-two-minute closing commentaries from This Week With David Brinkley from 1981 - 1996. Something a little lighter, so that viewers did not come away from the show too down-hearted after all of the talk of recession and murder and drugs.

And some of these are very light-hearted - like the story of the boy (in New Haven, CT - I don't think I remember that) who ran away, and took up residence at the bottom of his apartment building's elevator shaft. He leeched power for a small TV and, I believe, a hot plate, and was only discovered because building residents wondered why the elevator smelled like hot dogs every night. Some are more thoughtful than cheery, such as a note on the death of Benny Goodman in 1986.

But they aren't all filler and light-hearted; in fact, most are opinion pieces on events in Washington and more localized politics. At first I wasn't too thrilled by the then-timely now-contextless commentaries - but then I realized that a great many of them are still timely, and for the ones that aren't it's strangely fascinating to read about something that was screamingly urgent and vital twenty years ago which is barely a blip on most radar now. Perspective. And it's oddly comforting to read something like this, from December 26, 1982:

We might all hope that 1983 is a good year in all respects, 1983 standing alone, because it doesn't need any troubles of its own. It will inherit enough from 1982, and none of them will go away at midnight this Friday. The year 1983, for example, will inherit a recession spread around the world - 12 million unemployed, the first soup kitchens we have seen in a generation. It will inherit a Washington establishment spending close to $200 billion it does not have; a Congress that would like to bail itself out by raising taxes but can't; a Social Security system that if not rescued will very soon run out of money; and various industries - automobiles, steel, and so on - devastated by imports at least equal in quality but lower in price. And more. Our town here, Washington, regardless of who is in power, cannot fix all of this. But after a generation of promising to solve every social economic ailment, it has led people to expect Washington solutions, and so it will try a number of them. The good news is that the mathematics of probabilities shows that if they try hard enough, sooner or later, by accident or otherwise, somebody will do something right. It does seem that it's time, preferably in 1983, for the probabilities to go our way.

Make all the numbers, dates and dollar amounts, bigger: Things don't really change. Comforting, and also scary.

August 3, 1986

Next week Congress will be voting to set a new and higher federal government debt limit, to give the Treasury power to borrow still more money.

Sound familiar?

That happens quite a bit in this book. It's sharp and smart and often funny, and surprisingly relevant. I was wishing for more like the boy in the elevator shaft, but what I did get was, in its way, more useful.

Longer review on my blog.