Brian Jacques, You Are Dead to Me. Dean Koontz… You Might Be Next

Oh Lord, now how long has it been since I posted? 

That long, huh.

Well… sorry.  I keep going off to my job to “work” and “be a nurse.”  It’s fun sometimes and it’s really tough at other times, but I do love my patients and I rarely leave without learning a lot of new stuff.  Plus I have taken to listening to audiobooks on my commute, so even if I work on a particular day I can get in almost two hours of reading time.  It’s like magic! 

I read a bunch of books over the summer, of course, but one stands out as the most irritating book: Redwall by Brian Jacques.  I purchased this book long ago (possibly as far back as the late 1990s, when I used to work at a Barnes and Noble store).  It came highly recommended as young adult fantasy.

And… I hated it.  Pretty much the entire thing.  I thought the narrative was entirely predictable, the characters were cliché (and when they weren’t cliché, they were obnoxious), and the main character – the hero of the book, Mattias the mouse - was a sanctimonious twit.  The leader of the antagonists in the story, “Cluny the Scourge,” was equally annoying.  It is never a good sign when, as a reader, I am laughing at the stupidity of the bad guys and I want to stomp on the heads of the good guys.  On top of all of that, the sexist treatment of Cornflower, Mattias’ love interest, was just… ugh. 

Admittedly, I am not a huge fan of fantasy writing.  A few years ago I read a book that was about fairies that nearly put me into a coma.  I struggled to get through Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books (although I love the movies and the story). 

But it is also very unusual for me to not like something about a book.  In this case, all I can say in its defense is that, despite being written for children, the author does not shy away from interesting vocabulary choices.  Otherwise… I hated it.  And I will never read any of the ten zillion sequels.

So.  Onward to the Dean Koontz book that I read earlier this year, Brother Odd.  I really enjoyed the first book in this series, Odd Thomas, and I liked the second book, Forever Odd well enough to not be horribly annoyed by it.  Brother Odd, though… meh.

Dean Koontz has always been a wildly uneven writer.  I remember the first book I read of his, Strangers.  It was great for the first half – what a build-up! – but then the second half, with the explanation for what was going on, was total crap.  Later I read Watchers and loved it.  Intensity was pretty good, as long as you can suspend your disbelief long enough to believe that the smart main character would do something profoundly stupid in the middle of the book instead of doing the sane, sensible thing to save herself and others.  (SO annoying!)

Like I said, I liked the first two books in the Odd Thomas series, at least enough to keep reading.  The concept is solid; a man who sees the dead and sometimes works to avenge their deaths, and who also sees other supernatural creatures that portend terrible violence.  Odd is charming and quirky and has interesting friends, and he is truly heroic in Odd Thomas, the first book in the series.

But… Brother Odd is just kind of meh.  The writing in the narrative veers from quirky and fun to overwrought and dramatic and back, which is jarring.  But worse… not much happens in the first hundred pages or so.  The book is over four hundred pages long, but with proper editing it could have been much shorter.  (Not to mention better written.)

I will no doubt read Koontz again, because sometimes his books really are written well and they can even be scary.  I just can’t recommend Brother Odd.  And, like Redwall, it is going on the donation pile and leaving my house for good.

Thankfully I have been reading some fantastic stuff lately, and I hope to blog about it soon.  Not kidding.

Promise.