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A review by elisability
Bad Glass by Richard E. Gropp
2.0
Something weird is happening in Spokane. People are disappearing, things that shouldn’t exist are calmly walking down the streets, people become melded into walls, ceilings, floors, each other… The city is quarantined, but Dean Walker, a dumb selfish 20-something-year-old, sneaks in with a camera to take the pictures that will hopefully make him famous. There he meets a bunch of people who stayed in the city for no viable reason, and falls in love with literally the first girl he meets. Then things happen that make zero sense whatsoever and left me wondering what possessed me to even read this book in the first place.
There was a good story, a good idea, hidden somewhere in there. We saw it appear a bit around page 250, and then again in chapter 19. The rest just felt like a collection of random events without heads or tails, no explanations or sense whatsoever, interspersed with characters getting drunk and/or high. There was no continuity to anything, threads would just fizzle out with no conclusion. When two characters disappear, nobody even talks about the possibility of trying to rescue them. They just get high and move on with their “lives,” such as they are.
Actually, it read as if Gropp wrote this during NaNoWriMo (the month where you have to write 50K words), going in with no plan whatsoever and publishing it as soon as it was over, with absolutely no editing.
Plus, there was altogether too much swearing. If it’s organic, I don’t notice it, but if it starts jumping out at me, it means there’s too much.
My review reads like this should get 1*, but I only give 1* to books that make me angry for some reason. This didn’t make me angry, it just made me sad that something so bad could get published–and actually win a prize!
If you like the idea of a city becoming ground zero for something terrible and mysterious, I recommend [b:Lexicon|16158596|Lexicon|Max Barry|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1356080172s/16158596.jpg|20077336] by Max Barry instead. Much, much better.
There was a good story, a good idea, hidden somewhere in there. We saw it appear a bit around page 250, and then again in chapter 19. The rest just felt like a collection of random events without heads or tails, no explanations or sense whatsoever, interspersed with characters getting drunk and/or high. There was no continuity to anything, threads would just fizzle out with no conclusion. When two characters disappear, nobody even talks about the possibility of trying to rescue them. They just get high and move on with their “lives,” such as they are.
Actually, it read as if Gropp wrote this during NaNoWriMo (the month where you have to write 50K words), going in with no plan whatsoever and publishing it as soon as it was over, with absolutely no editing.
Plus, there was altogether too much swearing. If it’s organic, I don’t notice it, but if it starts jumping out at me, it means there’s too much.
My review reads like this should get 1*, but I only give 1* to books that make me angry for some reason. This didn’t make me angry, it just made me sad that something so bad could get published–and actually win a prize!
If you like the idea of a city becoming ground zero for something terrible and mysterious, I recommend [b:Lexicon|16158596|Lexicon|Max Barry|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1356080172s/16158596.jpg|20077336] by Max Barry instead. Much, much better.