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allthings 's review for:
Survivor Song
by Paul Tremblay
I was so disappointed with this book. I've been trying to get aboard the Paul Tremblay train, since he seems to be the hottest voice in horror right now, but something's just not working for me.
Like with The Cabin At The End of The World, this is a character-driven story, taking place over an even shorter time period than the aforementioned book. We follow Nats and Rams, two old friends, who are on a journey to the hospital, and then another hospital, that takes F-O-R-E-V-E-R. They're in the midst of an outbreak of super rabies, and Nats has been bitten. Not only that, but she's also pregnant, and they're in a race against time to try and get her treated. We're with them over the course of just a few hours as they desperately try to navigate though the chaos the pandemic has brought with it (How very timely...). All this sounds wonderfully exciting in theory, but in practice... it was boring.
Now I'm actually a big fan of introspective, character-driven horror, and I really dig the idea of the horror coming not from the situation the disease has created, but from watching your best friend succumbing to it, yet I found the pacing so awfully slow and the characters themselves so insufferable that I was wishing for Nats to just hurry up and kick the bucket already. After the initial burst of action where Nats is attacked, the only other part of interest was when they met up with two teenage boys who I would much rather have followed, but were quickly discarded by our self-centered protagonists.
Nats and Rams were both incredibly annoying people. Nats was snarky, Rams was bland, both were selfish. I don't even mind books about awful people, or books about good people who act selfishly because don't we all sometimes, but I felt as though the author wanted to write these two women as likable and failed miserably. In the same vein, when we encountered characters espousing conspiracy theories about the pandemic, I felt as though the author wanted us to see them as stupid or crazy, but at the same time... our main characters' actions actually made what these people were doing seem totally justified! A lot of the time I was frustrated, feeling like there was an interesting story to be told, but that it was stuck behind plodding, over-descriptive text and unsympathetic characters, unable to shine.
In conclusion, I feel like either I was being masterfully manipulated by the author, and this was truly supposed to be a novel about two selfish women that shows how gun-toting conspiracy theorists may actually have the right approach... or the protagonists were supposed to be sympathetic people, and the author failed spectacularly. In reality, I think it's probably neither, and just a case of me not meshing with his particular writing style!
Like with The Cabin At The End of The World, this is a character-driven story, taking place over an even shorter time period than the aforementioned book. We follow Nats and Rams, two old friends, who are on a journey to the hospital, and then another hospital, that takes F-O-R-E-V-E-R. They're in the midst of an outbreak of super rabies, and Nats has been bitten. Not only that, but she's also pregnant, and they're in a race against time to try and get her treated. We're with them over the course of just a few hours as they desperately try to navigate though the chaos the pandemic has brought with it (How very timely...). All this sounds wonderfully exciting in theory, but in practice... it was boring.
Now I'm actually a big fan of introspective, character-driven horror, and I really dig the idea of the horror coming not from the situation the disease has created, but from watching your best friend succumbing to it, yet I found the pacing so awfully slow and the characters themselves so insufferable that I was wishing for Nats to just hurry up and kick the bucket already. After the initial burst of action where Nats is attacked, the only other part of interest was when they met up with two teenage boys who I would much rather have followed, but were quickly discarded by our self-centered protagonists.
Nats and Rams were both incredibly annoying people. Nats was snarky, Rams was bland, both were selfish. I don't even mind books about awful people, or books about good people who act selfishly because don't we all sometimes, but I felt as though the author wanted to write these two women as likable and failed miserably. In the same vein, when we encountered characters espousing conspiracy theories about the pandemic, I felt as though the author wanted us to see them as stupid or crazy, but at the same time... our main characters' actions actually made what these people were doing seem totally justified! A lot of the time I was frustrated, feeling like there was an interesting story to be told, but that it was stuck behind plodding, over-descriptive text and unsympathetic characters, unable to shine.
In conclusion, I feel like either I was being masterfully manipulated by the author, and this was truly supposed to be a novel about two selfish women that shows how gun-toting conspiracy theorists may actually have the right approach... or the protagonists were supposed to be sympathetic people, and the author failed spectacularly. In reality, I think it's probably neither, and just a case of me not meshing with his particular writing style!