Reviews tagging 'Gore'

The Panama Laugh by Thomas S. Roche

1 review

applesaucecreachur's review

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adventurous funny tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I almost never read digital books, so this was a strange reading experience for me in a few ways. Frosty Bogart was an unrelatable, unethical, miserable protagonist who was somehow even hard to hate at times. Roche did well here crafting a character who has repressed self-awareness for his entire career and is a worse and funnier person for it. At the same time, Dante's got some screws loose when it comes to telling stories. One of my fellow reviewers on Storygraph referred to this style of storytelling as "stream of consciousness" and I'll adopt that here. Flashbacks snapped to real-time and back again. One minute we're watching Dante pulp some laughers, then we're hearing him wax about his past and the pissed-off people in it; after that, we're back on a bloody beach (or ship deck, or sex dungeon floor, or... you get the idea). Other than zombie apocalypse, the book seemed to have a hard time holding to a cohesive theme throughout.
There was a tiger on the loose in the final chapter, for god's sake.
And while I'm all for leaving some things unsaid and unanswered, I sure would have liked an explanation for why Dante
was immune to the virus thanks to getting tongued.
 I have other questions, of course, but that one is sure at the front of my mind. Giving credit where it's due, I do respect the amount of research and expertise it must have taken to write a story like this with as much military and technical knowledge as this one. But also, why Panama? Why Central America at all? The author even admits that he took liberties describing the geography in his author's note, so why choose an unfamiliar location in the Global South simply for the vibes? The most let-me-put-the-book-down-and-rub-my-eyes-into-mush-worthy moments came when Dante (Roche?) was describing women – and it should come as no surprise that this was especially uncomfortable with the Black, Latina, and Asian women we encounter in the story. Almost all objects of sexual desire in one way or another
(even the seventeen-year-old, Iggy!)
, I had to cringe my way through the majority of these passages. I won't act like the female characters were any more or less fleshed out than the males; everyone in the Panama Laugh was a mere character in Frosty's story, and we knew it. But I sure have an issue with substituting a fleshed-out character with... well, describing their flesh. And the things it seemed like they could do with it.
Anyway, happy Easter, I guess. Whenever it gets to be that time. 
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