Chadzilla ROARS!!!

Broken Angels - by Richard K. Morgan

Thirty years have passed since the events described in Altered Carbon.  Former U.N. Envoy Takeshi Kovacs is now a gun-for-hire for the government of a planet in the midst of a bloody revolution.  While recovering from wounds sustained on the battlefield, Kovacs meets Jan Schneider, a pilot with a lucrative scheme.  He, or someone he is associated with, has uncovered an apparently fully functional piece of Martian technology.  Kovacs and Schneider go AWOL, spring an Archaeologue (the far flung future's equivalent of an Archaeologist) and hunt for someone willing to fund the treasure hunt of the 25th century.

Things don't go well.

After enjoying Takeshi Kovacs's first adventure, I went into his second with high hopes for a plot filled with sudden twists and jarring turns, heavy doses of bone crunching action, and a cast of colorful and fascinating characters.  Well, after 198 pages, I can say that the plot is pretty straight forward, the action nonexistent, and the cast large and bland.  This one just did not hold my interest.

Author Richard K. Morgan painted such a vivid and somewhat believable futurist nightmare in Altered Carbon that it baffles me why he chose to ignore it in this follow-up.  Broken Angels is so unconnected to the first book (at least in its first half) that it reads like a completely different story that went through a hasty and poorly thought out rewrite in order to fulfill a demand for a new Takeshi Kovacs story from the publisher.

At the point that I am closing this particular book for good, the identity of the turncoat within the group's ranks is still unknown, the nano-blob has yet to go on the offensive, and the Martian technology has yet to become anything other than a MacGuffin.  If there is a big payoff at the end, I have lost all interest in working my way through the remaining 160+ pages to collect it.

Creature from the Black Lagoon: Time's Black Lagoon - by Paul Di Filippo

The year is 2015 and Global Warming is changing the Earth's ecosystem.  Forward thinking scientist Brice Chalefant believes that humanity's long term survival depends on its adapting to a more amphibious state of being.  Big fan of Waterworld, I guess.  Although his theory is not embraced by the scientific community, Tarquin Hasselrude, an elderly and highly respected scientist, shares with Chalefant the startling discovery of an honest to goodness Gill-Man in the upper Amazon in 1954...

There's more to it than that, stuff involving time machines and ancient Gill-Men and women from the stars, I think, settling Devonian era Earth, but I didn't make it that far.  I gave up at the start of Chapter Five.

When Dark Horse books first announced that they would be publishing a series of novels based on the classic Universal Monster movies of yesteryear (Frankenstein and his Bride, Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon) I was every bit as excited and I was intrigued.  What better place to start, I thought, than with my all-time favorite Universal Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon?

I went into Creature from the Back Lagoon: Time's Black Lagoon hoping for a loving retro-style return to the "Lost World" pulp adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others.  What I got instead was a mix of shoddy futurist dystopia tinged science-fiction, clumsy plotting, and stick figure sketching that was somehow meant to pass for character development.  Not once in the sixty pages I managed to wade through did I find a single solitary moment of 50s B-movie fun.  Where were the larger than life heroes?  The smart talking heroine that delivers coffee to the LTLHs before getting carried off, kicking and screaming, in the arms of the Creature?

Come to think of it, where was the Creature?  Yes, I know, there was that prologue featuring a "smart and gentle" Creature fleeing from the "Coarsened Ones".  But that wasn't the Creature of the 1950s movie series and that, more than anything, is what I wanted.  I wanted Beauty, Beast, and a square jawed Man of Action that fights the Beast to save the Beauty for himself.

I know enough about write-for-hire projects to not lay the blame entirely at author Paul Di Filippo's word processor.  Whoever was given editorial control over how the property was handled by the owner of the rights to the Creature (which would probably be someone representing the commercial interests of Universal) is to blame for allowing the Creature to be mucked up this badly, and mucked up badly it was.  I tossed Creature from the Black Lagoon: Time's Black Lagoon back.  It can sleep with the fishes as far as I am concerned.

Soultaker - by Bryan Smith

Jake McAllister returns home to help save his younger half-brother from the clutches of girlfriend from the worst side of the tracks, Hell itself.

I'm sure that Bryan Smith is a good, decent and hard-working man.  But good mythical-lord was this novel awful.  It breaks the supposed first rule of storytelling by telling instead of showing.  Another problem is that there isn't a single character in the book, or at least in the first 58 pages that I read, that was interesting, likable, or sympathetic.  Outlandish stuff is just shoved into the readers face, with no perceptible effort taken to put them into context or create a feeling of suspense or dread.  Soultaker is a truly dreadful book.

No matter your gender, I think that you will agree that every narrative artist (writer, poet or filmmaker) has a Lover from Hell story in them.  Sometimes these stories are told with humor, other times with melodramatic bombast, or, as is the case here, as battle of the sexes horror story.

The power of First Love and the inevitable painful lessons in harsh reality that it teaches (one lesson being that loving a bad person doesn't make said person want to be good, another is that it can make a smart person very, very dumb) have birthed countless therapy sessions in fictional form.  Soultakerappears to be one, although author Bryan Smith goes to considerable lengths in his acknowledgments to let the reader know that his novel is not autobiographical.  Every seasoned spinner of tales knows that sometimes all it takes is a single image, or hearing a word said in a certain way, to fertilize the egg of imagination.  Even if 99.9% of the narrative is utter make-believe, it is that .1% inspirational kernel that readers and critics will try to sniff out.  Who the hell was she and what the hell did she say or do to inspire this book?  Then again, maybe there is no she at all.  The world will probably never know, and it will be a better place for it.

Cold Whisper - by Rick Hautala

Sarah Lahikainen's imaginary friend Tully is far from imaginary.  Just ask any person that was ever unlucky enough to get Sarah good and angry.  You probably won't get an answer, though.  Because they are all dead.

Plagued by guilt and self-loathing, Sarah manages to successfully drive Tully away.  But a short time after doing so the man who raped and murdered Sarah's mother abducts Sarah so he can tie up some "loose ends."

Rick Hautala's Cold Whisper is the latest addition to my short and inglorious list of Novels-So-Incredibly-Awful-I-Could-Not-Finish-Reading-Them.  It joins literary debacles such as Clive Barker's Imajica and Richard Laymon's Island on my Bookshelf of Shame.  But while I found Imajica to be insufferably overwritten and dull, and Island to be insufferably overwritten, grotesquely sleazy and drawn out to the point of becoming dull, Cold Whisper was simply offensive and insulting to my intelligence. 

Hautala's book, like all his others, is plagued by a writing style that swings back and forth from poor to lazy.  There is no such thing as narrative subtlety in a Rick Hautala novel.  He delights in going needlessly overboard, always choosing to drive home each and every plot development with a sledgehammer made of soap opera styled melodrama.  Sarah Lahikainen is not only an unlikable character, she is almost impossible to relate to, as her inner turmoil and suffering is manifested as the worst kind of self-centered self-pity.  The supernatural "character" of Tully and his murderous exploits have almost nothing whatsoever to do with the real life terrors that Sarah faces in the book's final hundred pages.  This is where the book offended and insulted.  In the first half of the novel, Tully rips apart Sarah's pet cat, kills her baby brother, her pregnant stepmother, and some stupid drunk slob that attempts to sexually assault her at a graduation party.  Yet he is somehow incapable of coming to Sarah's aid when her mother is brutally raped and murdered right before her eyes.  The worst he can do is freak the guy out by giving him a gentle tap on the shoulder.

Yeah, right.

Then there is the matter of Sarah's abduction and sexual assault that kicks off the book's final hundred pages.  That was the point where I decided "no more" and closed the book without finishing it and, for personal reasons, I refuse to even discuss that disgustingly lazy attempt at inducing "horror."

But if you are ever in the mood for a scary story about a troubled teen and his murderous imaginary friend, then track down a copy of Charles L. Grant's novel The Pet instead.