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A review by throatsprockets
Consumed by David Cronenberg
3.0
I'm a big fan of David Cronenberg's movies, especially his earlier ones, and I was excited to read a book by him as I think he's made too many movies from other peoples' scripts in recent years, and his output has been less distinctive as a result. In some ways Consumed delivered a vintage Cronenberg experience, but in other ways it was a profound disappointment.
The problem is that Cronenberg seems easily distracted. He starts off with a couple of interesting ideas about surgery, cannibalism and disease, but from there he seems to continually get bored with ideas and drop them while adding more. By the end of the story many interesting concepts have been raised and left undeveloped. With all of these loose ends a satisfactory ending would be very difficult, but the ending we get is worse than that - it feels as if Cronenberg looked at his word count, thought "That's a novel!" and just stopped writing.
I didn't think it was a complete waste of time as the ideas were interesting, the characters were delightful, and I mostly enjoyed reading it, but to be honest I'd probably enjoy reading his rough notes almost as much.
The problem is that Cronenberg seems easily distracted. He starts off with a couple of interesting ideas about surgery, cannibalism and disease, but from there he seems to continually get bored with ideas and drop them while adding more. By the end of the story many interesting concepts have been raised and left undeveloped. With all of these loose ends a satisfactory ending would be very difficult, but the ending we get is worse than that - it feels as if Cronenberg looked at his word count, thought "That's a novel!" and just stopped writing.
I didn't think it was a complete waste of time as the ideas were interesting, the characters were delightful, and I mostly enjoyed reading it, but to be honest I'd probably enjoy reading his rough notes almost as much.