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A review by terrypaulpearce
Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot
1.0
#dnf
I'm always going on at people for saying the emperor has no clothes with a book; I think it's a deflecting, egocentric response. And I guess it's not Boudinot's fault the jacket compares him to William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk, or that a lot of people mention this in the same breath as Infinite Jest. But... What?
I can only speak for myself, bt the writing quality here just does not belong in the same universe as such, for me. Having given up around page 100, I'm aware from what I've read that I probably gave up too soon to really get the twists or the wholeness of it, or what it was really about... but... meh. I didn't care. Maybe I'm just a prose junkie, or a character junkie, but it all just seemed a bit thin. I wasn't sure who or what I was supposed to care about, or on what basis. There was too much random weirdness for me (and yeah, maybe later it falls into place, but I need to care enough to find out). There seemed a kind of try-hardness to the writing, and some really strange absurdism that was way too random and absurd for straight-up fiction, and not enough so for Douglas Adams / Terry Pratchett type funny oddness. Random shock-value words and ideas seemed thrown in, and gross-outs, and just all kinda stuff... the language seemed to change from moment to moment, jarring and throwing me... and none of the characters seemed too deep, or real.
Also, I got the impression it was supposed to be kinda funny, but I really couldn't figure out how.
Maybe it's written for people a lot younger than me.
I'm always going on at people for saying the emperor has no clothes with a book; I think it's a deflecting, egocentric response. And I guess it's not Boudinot's fault the jacket compares him to William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk, or that a lot of people mention this in the same breath as Infinite Jest. But... What?
I can only speak for myself, bt the writing quality here just does not belong in the same universe as such, for me. Having given up around page 100, I'm aware from what I've read that I probably gave up too soon to really get the twists or the wholeness of it, or what it was really about... but... meh. I didn't care. Maybe I'm just a prose junkie, or a character junkie, but it all just seemed a bit thin. I wasn't sure who or what I was supposed to care about, or on what basis. There was too much random weirdness for me (and yeah, maybe later it falls into place, but I need to care enough to find out). There seemed a kind of try-hardness to the writing, and some really strange absurdism that was way too random and absurd for straight-up fiction, and not enough so for Douglas Adams / Terry Pratchett type funny oddness. Random shock-value words and ideas seemed thrown in, and gross-outs, and just all kinda stuff... the language seemed to change from moment to moment, jarring and throwing me... and none of the characters seemed too deep, or real.
Also, I got the impression it was supposed to be kinda funny, but I really couldn't figure out how.
Maybe it's written for people a lot younger than me.