Subservient to no one

According to Stephen King, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers”, but The Running Man is a book that would have vastly benefited from some careful planning. This novel feels too much like an opportunity missed, in a number of ways. As the title alone suggests, what you’d expect to be a fast-paced, action-packed thriller is instead a wee bit plodding and pedestrian (more of a walking man). I wanted a tale in which the protagonist is attacked relentlessly from all sides, at all times: something fast and trilling and terrifying. The book is structured into one hundred sections, counting down form one hundred to zero (in fact that may be one-hundred-and-one sections in total). It’s the sort of literary device that might seem like a good idea in your head but in reality turns out to be tedious and cumbersome, and more of a hindrance than anything else. I couldn’t help thinking that much of what I was reading was mere filler to make up the numbers rather than important pl...

Some of my worst experiences as a reader come from reading the work of best-selling authors; a banal subsistance of writers whose qualifying attributes arise from their ability to blandly appeal to a wide variety of consumers. Being mostly into the Avant-Garde, it is not surprising I find acute tedium in the realms of the best-sellers, but I do occasionally subject myself to their creative renderings out of intrigue and perhaps from a kind of self torture. Four chapters in on The Business by Iain Banks I am struck by how trite the characters are, how banal and wooden they are, how they are basically cliches ranging from posh toffs who like cars to Americans who like guns. They are like rejects from a BBC drama characters from a BBC drama; characters one has seen before, not new, original, interesting characters, just recycled archetypes: mediocre characters; the type you'd expect to find in a best-selling novel who are just bland enough (and I am assuming supposedly likea...

Um, spoiler alert, I guess. Perhaps I am reading Dickens wrong. I have not (not yet) visited the Victorian era, and reading his work from the comfort of my 21 st Century poverty, I have but the faintest inkling of true Victorian poverty. Around 1/3 of the urban population lived in poverty, as told here by Angie Speaks in this excellent work house video, and there were plenty of ways the poor were subjugated and systematically punished. So when one reads Dickens, I think one must remind oneself that Dickens lived in a world where poverty, death and sickness were commonplace, and not merely things transmitted to people's homes via the safe distance of mass medium communications. The prose at the beginning of A Christmas Carol describes Scrooge much like a pantomime villain, and despite this, I think one should acknowledge the severity of Scrooge's selfishness. Those opening words are not dissimilar to that of a fairytale, but like a fairytale, the story comes from a w...

 Review of the novel by John Wyndham. This is a novel with timing issues. I have, on a number of occasions, been afflicted with ailments of varying natures – although admittedly I have never been struck with blindness – yet these illnesses on their own have never inspired me to take my own life. In fact, even when recovery was uncertain, I still held hope that in a few days, with or without medication, the problem would clear up. Blindness too can be temporary; so it surprises me a little how so many of the earth's inhabitants in The Day of the Triffids so swiftly and so keenly take to killing themselves. Sure, I would expect suicides to occur after a few days, once people have decided their blindness was permanent and starvation has stimulated their mind's desperation, but I feel this book's characters spring to self-annihilation much too quickly. This is not a major flaw however, the suicides would come eventually, so Wyndham's over-eagerness has little affec...