Yesterday’s sock puppet review was somewhat unsatisfactory… Mr. Longfellow III was too highbrow for the material, apparently, so I made my next sock puppet reviewer a little more… straightforward. Unfortunately Weev1l42 decided to review The Points Between…
There’s a point in every book-reading experience where I wind up wanting to punch the writer repeatedly in face. I rate each book based on how long it takes me to get there: the longer it takes, the higher the grade. So far the highest grade is four days, seven hours, twenty six minutes (“War and Peace”) and that might be misleading because it took me that long to get to page four.
Well I’ll get right to the point: The Points Between made me want to punch the writer in the face before I started reading the prologue.
Why? Because it has a prologue. I mean dude. Prologue? Seriously?
Look, I don’t want to tell anyone what to do but you don’t do prologues any more. Prologues suck. If you include a prologue in your book, your book will suck. It will, simply by the presence of existing, cause the book to sink into a swampy mass of This Is A Bad Book and everyone will stay away because nobody likes sinking into a swampy mass. Someday I will write a book called For Christ’s Sake, Don’t Put A Prologue In Your Book You Self-Important Nit and I will send the writer a free copy because it’s the least I can do.
So The Points Between started off as a major fail, and gets a score of negative five minutes because it took me five minutes to fight back my rage, after learning it had a prologue, before I could bring myself to start reading.
After forcing myself to read the prologue, which has something to do with driving through trees, but I don’t think alcohol is involved because I didn’t find it terribly interesting, we get to Chapter One. Alcohol isn’t involved in this either. It basically has three parts:
1. Dude walks through a grove of trees.
2. Dude walks across a field.
3. Dude sees a party.
That’s literally what happens in chapter one. I got a little hopeful with the party, because when he sees the party, dude also sees a girl, and I thought hey, now we’re getting somewhere, because the dude is an artist, and any time I’ve ever seen an artist meet a girl at a party it ends in a court-mandated paternity test. Every. Single. Time. But no, this is fiction, and “fiction” apparently means “we leave out the good parts.” So chapter 2 is… I dunno, I’m sort of spacing out, there’s dancing involved, but it’s not sexy dancing, it’s more like Jane Austen dancing and I only say that because I saw one of those movies once just to impress a girl, I don’t actually read Jane Austen or anything. Point is, this is pretty boring, right?
Chapter 3 picks up a little when dude gets chased down by some weird things, but I could do without the kissing. Chapter 2 would have been better for the kissing, in chapter 3 it was just kind of weird. I’m not saying anything about anyone or anything, I’m just saying I don’t like it when the partner is a grotesque parody of humanity with skin like dry, cracked parchment. Just not where I get my kicks.
But hey, at least there’s weirdness, right? Then all of a sudden dude is in a town, like a small southern podunk town with a sheriff and all that and at that point I just can’t take it any more because What. The. Hell? This is supposed to be a serial, right? That means car chases, explosions, and the hero dangling off a cliff at the end of every chapter. There hasn’t been any cliff-hanging at all!
So it turns out the guy isn’t writing that story. Apparently he doesn’t want to write something with zombies in it. He’s just too good to dirty himself writing car chases and gun battles. He doesn’t want to lower himself to the level of adding a 2 meter tall hyperintelligent bug with three prehensile tails instead of arms. He keeps talking about this dude “Charles Williams” who was apparently pals with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, so that shows you the problem right there. Don’t get me wrong, LOTR was AWESOME (Sean Bean was my favorite) but man, those guys are old, and I tried reading The Two Towers once and all I remember is wanting to dig up Tolkien’s grave so I could punch him in the face. (Final score: fifteen minutes.)
So I did a little research on this Charles Williams dude. Well, I looked him up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia says he’s a British writer, and I stopped reading right there, because that told me pretty much everything I needed to know right there. Everyone knows the only good thing that came out of Britain was The Office. And Sherlock Holmes. And Doctor Who. Well a lot of the British TV is awesome, OK, and some of the music kicks ass, but the English never did a damn thing for books.
So this dude was trying to be like the dead British guy. I can’t say if he succeeded or not because I’m not going to go read some other dude’s book just to see the one dude did something like the other dude, especially if the dude is dead, because restraining orders.
Oh, the other problem? There’s only 24 chapters so far. I mean, he’s been doing this for a year, he couldn’t update once a week? Slacker. I swear it just makes me want to punch him more, which won’t affect his score any but it might make me feel better.
