A review by rosekk
'48 by James Herbert

3.0

It was fun. The idea behind it's a bit ridiculous, but I can get past that. The thing that knocked the book down a few notches in my estimation was the writing style. I've liked James Herbert's stories before and never noticed a significant flaw in his writing before, so I don't think it's a fault with him in general; something just went wrong in with this book. Either that, or I haven't noticed until now. It just gets heavy-handed in places, explaining things in a way that breaks immersion. For instance, early on there's some description of the setting as the narrator races through it. He makes a point of saying that he didn't notice what he's describing at the time of the events being described, but before, because now he's too busy to have noticed. There might have been away to make that observation fit, but the way it was done just reminded me that this exposition/description was too detailed for the chase scene we were in, which I probably wouldn't have questioned if he'd just given the description and never called attention to the incongruity. Also, I found the repetition of breasts being pressed up against the narrator odd, just because it happened in the weirdest moments; several times the main cast are running from sick Nazi mad men out for their blood, and there'd be a lull in action for the narrator to describe a pair of breasts being briefly pressed into him. I know the character is meant to have been lonely, but that doesn't account for why a persons attention would shift so dramatically. The whole book peppered with these odd, slightly jarring things which made it hard to enjoy the experience.