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3.05 AVERAGE
3.05 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Really interesting story, but the ending just didn’t do it for me. It felt like the last chapter should have happened somewhere in the middle of the book. Made it feel a bit disjointed. But otherwise a very strange but interesting read. Exactly what I would expect from Cronenberg
challenging
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Weird and excessive for the sake of weird excessiveness. So typical Cronenberg (I'm a big fan, honestly). Sort of like an uninspired cross between Videodrome and Naked Lunch except not even half as good as either of those. Only intermittently interesting and trying way to hard to be about everything at once and misses the mark almost every time.
soft DNF @ 60%
Cronenberg is my favorite filmmaker and I was extremely excited for this. Willing to overlook some of the flaws with book, I have unfortunately reached a point where I questioned if I actually wanted to keep reading this out of interest or some kind of obligation. I think I will set this down for now and hopefully when I get my own copy that I can annotate I will revisit this.
I do want to see how this ends, but it reads so much like a movie novelization I need a break. Still love you Cronenberg 🫰🏼 they can’t all be winners.
Cronenberg is my favorite filmmaker and I was extremely excited for this. Willing to overlook some of the flaws with book, I have unfortunately reached a point where I questioned if I actually wanted to keep reading this out of interest or some kind of obligation. I think I will set this down for now and hopefully when I get my own copy that I can annotate I will revisit this.
I do want to see how this ends, but it reads so much like a movie novelization I need a break. Still love you Cronenberg 🫰🏼 they can’t all be winners.
fast-paced
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
As comprehensive a manifesto of Dave's obsessions as you could as for.
Technology, disease, tortured flesh, kink, poncey aristocrats, duality, cannibalism and on and on and on. If you took a shot for every authorial fetish documented, you'd be dead by chapter three.
It all ends pretty abruptly - some might say it’s more about the ride than the final destination.
One thing's for sure, though: Cronenberg Fucks.
Technology, disease, tortured flesh, kink, poncey aristocrats, duality, cannibalism and on and on and on. If you took a shot for every authorial fetish documented, you'd be dead by chapter three.
It all ends pretty abruptly - some might say it’s more about the ride than the final destination.
One thing's for sure, though: Cronenberg Fucks.
I have no idea why I read this entire thing. Maybe I just hate myself. Maybe because I somehow doubted it could end as badly as it began, and it wound up being worse. The writing style is dispassionately in-your-face, a sort of emphatic blandness. I get that the style is meant to be a clinical portrayal of "horror" and "philosophy," but the ham-handed use of brutally cold language serves only to emphasize the far too obvious message of the book. The graphic body horror and frightening sexuality did, occasionally, serve to make me uncomfortable, but after a while I totally lost all sensitization to the word "breast."
The ending is terrible. I actually had to go online and research to find out if the ebook I was reading had been cut off, because it ends so abruptly. Turns out at least a few other reviews found the sudden stop jarring, and it doesn't leave me wanting more. It only leaves me angry that I read 270 pages of nonsense in the hopes that it would eventually say something that wasn't apparent on the first page. It didn't.
The ending is terrible. I actually had to go online and research to find out if the ebook I was reading had been cut off, because it ends so abruptly. Turns out at least a few other reviews found the sudden stop jarring, and it doesn't leave me wanting more. It only leaves me angry that I read 270 pages of nonsense in the hopes that it would eventually say something that wasn't apparent on the first page. It didn't.