Tag: chuck wendig

#REVIEW: Black River Orchard, by Chuck Wendig

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

This is going to look kind of weird on the page, but having done the usually done thing by starting this book review with a high-res copy of the book cover, let me now pivot and … embed a YouTube video:

The episode that clip is from aired in April of 2000. According to Wikipedia, Stephen King has written thirty fucking books since then, and I own nearly all of them. But King is 76, and it is really starting to feel like publishing is jockeying for who gets to step into his shoes when he passes. We all know the dude’s never going to retire; he’ll die at his keyboard and there are probably two decades of unpublished manuscripts out there. I’ll be dead before the last “undiscovered Stephen King manuscript” gets published, probably after being finished by Brandon Sanderson. And thirty books ago, King was already being lampooned (I’m not sorry, shut up) for being a guy who just throws shit at the wall to see what sticks.

A few years ago, Chuck Wendig wrote Wanderers, a book I liked a whole lot. The elevator pitch on that book was “What if Chuck Wendig wrote THE STAND,” and the book and the publicity all leaned into that comparison really hard. Since then he’s written three books: The Book of Accidents, which I wasn’t terribly fond of but not in a way that I blame the book for, and a sequel to Wanderers that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of right now. But the King comparisons haven’t stopped, and the massive change to his writing style to something more comfortably commercial that he debuted with Wanderers hasn’t changed, and anyway all of this is a long introduction so that I can write this sentence:

Black River Orchard is about evil apples.

I would like to submit that evil apples are at least equally as ridiculous, if not more so, than a lamp monster. But if Stephen King wrote a book about a lamp monster, I’d probably read it, and Chuck Wendig’s book about evil apples is six hundred and seventeen pages long and I read the whole thing cover-to-cover in less than 48 hours. It has been a long time since I have started a book, read the first 100 pages in a gulp, and then resolved that I was going to be doing more or less nothing else until I finished the book. I went and voted today. That and read this book are all I’ve done.

It’s a book about evil apples and it’s real real real fucking good. If Wendig’s books lately have shared a common weakness it’s that I haven’t loved their endings; this book nails the dismount. Orchard does not end happily; every character who survives is broken and changed by the horror of the book’s events, but it ends correctly; there are a lot of ways this book could have gone and most of the rest of them would have been wrong.

(Was it a good choice to read this at the end of October, by the way? Yes. Yes it was.)

Anyway, point is this is a good book. It’s creepy as hell– one thing Wendig hasn’t changed about his writing style is his ability to write about completely fucked up shit in a tremendously effective way, and I had to put the book down for a few minutes last night after a particularly brutal scene– and it’s nicely unpredictable. It also manages to be about something ridiculous without ever making fun of its own premise; I told my wife at about the 1/4 mark that I wasn’t looking forward to what I thought of as the inevitable scene where one of our protagonists has to convince someone that The Apples Are Evil, because how the hell do you write that conversation without being completely ridiculous and inadvertently comic, and, well, Wendig does it by being a better and smarter writer than me and by setting his book up in a way that a number of non-apple-eaters are slowly drawn together over the course of the book and so they never really need to convince anyone of anything; everyone has experienced the Apple Evil in their own way and so talking anyone else into it isn’t really necessary. Putting in a conversation where the book was making fun of its own plot would have broken it; that never happens.

Five stars, seven thumbs up, one of my favorite reads of the year. You’ll hear about this one in December, I’m sure.

When originality backfires

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It took me much too long to get to Chuck Wendig’s latest book, The Book of Accidents, because Chuck is from Pennsylvania and so is Sarah J. Maas, who I had already read a book by this year, and therefore Pennsylvania was already filled up on my stupid little map. But I’d been looking forward to this a lot– Chuck is one of my favorites– and I finally got to it this week.

I didn’t like it as much as I feel like I should have, and I really hate it when that happens, because I never know how to translate that to a star rating, and then I get irritated with myself for caring about star ratings— I may just start rating every single book I read that doesn’t personally irritate me at five stars on Goodreads just to stop having to agonize about this– and I think I ended up just calling this one four stars for the hell of it.

Here is the deal with this book: I said to my wife during the first or second night of reading it that it really feels like Wendig, with his last couple of books, is quite deliberately trying to horn in on Stephen King’s turf, or at least the turf that King occupied when he was writing his most well-known and immortal books. Wanderers, which I liked quite a lot, got compared to The Stand all over the damn place, and with very good reason. And while this book didn’t map onto any specific King book as cleanly as Wanderers did, it still felt quite a lot like vintage, if updated, Stephen King.

And it also very much wants you to think it’s a haunted house book for, oh, the first third or so of its length. And it is not a haunted house book. It is so very much not a haunted house book, no, it is something else entirely. Like, I really don’t think you’re going to see a lot of what this book has for you coming.

I, uh, was really looking forward to a good haunted house book, though, and I got super excited about what looked like it was going to be a great haunted house book.

Which is why I’m not calling this a review, because I’m not sure if it’s the book’s fault that I wasn’t willing to go with it where it wanted to go. Maybe it is! I mean, it’s not like I picked up a Louis L’Amour book expecting to read a haunted house book. Like, there’s haunted house DNA all over this damn thing. Which sounds gross. You know what I mean. It’s not unfair to expect a creepy haunted house story from this book. In fact, I think Wendig is pretty obviously counting on it. And normally when something like this happens while I’m reading– you think the story is going to go BLAH, but instead it goes NYAH, it’s a compliment. Predictability is generally bad. Except, apparently, in this case, where I can’t claim that it ruined the book– it’s not like I regret reading it or anything, although I think even at my most charitable it’s not as strong as Wanderers. It’s just not what I wanted from it, and as a result I didn’t like it as much as I thought I was going to.

#Review: WANDERERS, by Chuck Wendig

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers is one of those books that could have been very disappointing. To start, I have been waiting for this book for what seems like a very long time. I actually pre-ordered it, which I don’t do with books all that often– I am generally backlogged enough in my reading that even books that I’ve been looking forward to and whose authors I’m big fans of have to wait for a while for me to get to them. Not this one. I not only preordered it, I specifically timed the books I was reading before it so that I would be free and clear and able to start something new immediately when it showed up in my mailbox. So if it had been bad, there is a strong possibility that I might have cried. Actual book-nerd tears. It woulda been a problem.

Let’s not bury the lede any further: Wanderers is Wendig’s best book, and by a pretty large margin– and, again, remember that this is a guy who I am fond of and whose work has shown up in my end-of-year top 10 before. So this is way better than a bunch of books that I really liked. What’s fascinating about it is how different it is from all of Wendig’s other work. His previous work– which includes multiple Star Wars novels, books that have always sort of had a house style– has always been instantly recognizable: short sentences, present tense, visceral detail, and a certain disregard for strict grammar conventions in favor of impactful language. You can show me a single paragraph from any of Wendig’s previous books and I’d be able to tell you it was his. That recognizable.

Wanderers throws all that out the window. This book must have been a beast to write– not only is it markedly longer than any of his previous books (it’s probably close to twice as long as its closest competitor) but the style of the writing is completely different. I would never have guessed Wendig wrote this from a paragraph or even a chapter, although you certainly see his humor and his themes come through– it is, if this makes any sense, a Wendig book made up of nearly 800 not-very-Wendig pages.

That probably doesn’t make any sense.

So, the plot, and this will be spoiler-free, for the most part: the elevator pitch for this book is “What if Chuck Wendig wrote The Stand,” and those seven words were more than enough to earn my money. To be clear, The Stand is one of Stephen King’s two or three best books, and while I’ll need to read Wanderers a couple more times over the next decade or so to see if it lives up to that book’s very high standard, the comparison is not remotely unfair to either book. This book is about a plague, and the end of the world, and a presidential election, and white supremacists, and it’s about all of those things before we mention the titular Wanderers, people who are locked into their own bodies and sleepwalking … somewhere. The world doesn’t even start ending until like halfway through the book, and the omnipresent sense of dread and horror is thick enough to drag your fingers through, even before the book gets around to one of the scarier human villains I’ve read recently. The book is not stingy with its mysteries, and the way they unfold over the course of its somehow-still-fast-paced 780 pages is immensely satisfying.

I have read 74 books so far this year, and of those 74, 17 are on my shortlist for the end of the year. It’s been a good year for reading! But this is the first book that I’ve read and known beyond a shadow of a doubt that yeah, this one’s gonna be top three. You should read Wanderers, and you should start now.

That’s How We Get Ants: a #review of @chuckwendig’s INVASIVE

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

51trpgxixzl-_sx325_bo1204203200_Today was my day off.  In honor of my day off, I got home from taking the boy to school, read yesterday’s comic books, finished Invasive, and then went to bed until about 4:00.  I didn’t oversleep; I didn’t take a longer nap than I wanted to.  Sleeping for the entire day was the plan and I regret nothing.  On Saturday, I worked an 11-hour shift, 6.5 on Sunday, 8 on Monday, and 11 on Tuesday and Wednesday.  That’s nearly fifty hours, all of it on my feet, including unloading furniture trucks on Tuesday.  I needed the sleep.

So.  Yeah.  Invasive.

I think the best thing I can say about this book is that I wish to hell I had written it.  Invasive is exactly what I want my own work to be: it’s a fast-paced read, hugely cinematic– of everything I’ve read of Wendig’s, and I’ve read a fair number of his books by now, this would most easily translate into a movie– and juuust futuristic and sciencey enough to keep things interesting.  I like books that have characters in them who are smarter than I am, and half the characters in this book make me look like Sarah Palin by comparison.

Oh, and it’s creepy as hell, too, to the point where reading it is virtually guaranteed to literally make you physically uncomfortable at times.  Take a gander at the cover, there, and understand that the book begins with a definition of the word formication, which I’m going to be a jerk and make you Google rather than defining it.  This book is gonna screw with your head.  It’s gonna screw with your body.  And once you’re done being creeped out, you’re going to appreciate it.

Note that if you go to Amazon and check out the listing, you will see that this book is listed as being part of a series– a sequel to Zer0es, which I also quite liked.  The links are very tenuous.  There’s a character or two in common and one brief reference to the first book.  I almost didn’t realize it was a sequel, and if you haven’t read Zer0es, there is absolutely nothing to worry about.

So go read it.

(Oh, and there’s an extended Archer riff.  There are not characters in this book named Archer, Barry, Ray, and Pam by accident.  There just aren’t.)

Yeah haha whatever

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ants-4239_640.jpgNormal blogging is suspended today because I damn near just stayed up last night until I had Chuck Wendig’s INVASIVE finished, only that would have meant very little sleep, and I was enough of a zombie at work today as it was.  I have tomorrow off, so I’m ferdamnsure gonna get the thing finished before I sleep.

Expect a review soon.  In the meantime, spoiler alert, I’m gonna tell you to buy the damn book so you may as well go ahead and do that.

Many of You Have Dumb Opinions: A Review of @ChuckWendig’s STAR WARS: AFTERMATH

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

51HNexIdPzL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Lemme see, lemme see, how shall I start?

I was as disappointed as anyone when Disney decided to wipe out the Expanded Universe.

Wait, no, that’s not true.  I was as disappointed as any normal person when Disney decided to wipe out the Expanded Universe.  I did not go on to act like an insane asshole about it, though, and many people chose that route, so I clearly wasn’t as disappointed as anyone.  I hung out with(*) Timothy Zahn this summer, the guy who wrote the Thrawn books, and he seemed like he was having a pretty normal weekend, so I figure I can probably find a way to move on if he can.

I have been further disappointed by the fact that I have hated every single New EU book that has come out so far.  I’ve bought all but one of them– I haven’t grabbed Dark Disciple yet, for no good reason– because I am an eternal optimist and a creature of habit, but I literally haven’t finished one of them, because they have been terrible.  Maybe I finished A New Dawn.  I’m a huge fan of Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid series, and I was enormously excited that he was writing a Star Wars book.  It turns out that first-person Luke Skywalker books should be illegal, and Heir to the Jedi was one of the worst books I’ve ever read.  Half of one, anyway; I didn’t come close to finishing it.

Star Wars books had one more chance, and that one chance was Star Wars: Aftermath.  I love Chuck Wendig, but I love Kevin Hearne too, and that didn’t work out so well.

And then the reviews started rolling in, and they were awful, and it almost kept me from ordering the book until I realized the incredible percentage of poor reviews that were clearly written by morons.  So I bought the book and I read it.

Star Wars: Aftermath is not my favorite Star Wars book.  Star Wars: Aftermath is not my favorite Chuck Wendig book, either.  That honor goes to The Blue Blazes, which, c’mon, sequel already.

Here are some good reasons to not like Aftermath:

  • Chuck Wendig’s typical writing style– present tense, with choppy sentences and occasionally deliberately brutalized syntax– is hardly Star Wars house style.  If you’re not ready for it– I was, obviously, because I’ve read his books before– it can be jarring.
  • The book is focused on minor and/or new characters.  Han Solo and Chewbacca show up for an interlude section, and do not affect the main narrative in any way.  I can see this being disappointing.

I don’t dislike Aftermath for either of those reasons.  In fact, I don’t dislike Aftermath at all.  It’s a pretty good book.  But I wouldn’t want to punch you if you didn’t like the book and you cited one of those reasons.

Many of the one-star reviews, sadly, are from people who perhaps need more punching– or perhaps more appropriately a firm slap to the back of the head and a stern reminder to fix your broken life.  

Here’s what I liked about Aftermath:  the Star Wars universe– well, okay, galaxy— is really big, and a major political event like the fall of the Empire is going to have an effect on every corner of it.  While a lot of people aren’t going to like that the book breaks away from the Big Four of Han, Luke, Leia and Chewie, I think it’s actually a strength.  The book pokes its nose into lots of different corners– some we’ve heard of, some we haven’t, and some we’re getting our first glimpse of other than a brief shot or two in a trailer– and we see the effects of the Empire’s dissolution across the galaxy.  The book is sprinkled with short, three- or four-page Interlude chapters, which pick a character and a planet and tell a  really short story about them.  None of them impact on the main narrative.  It’s a great way to spread the breadth of the story without hugely overloading it with more people and situations to keep track of.  The interludes are just that– interludes.  You could skip all of them if you wanted to, but that would be a dumb decision.

If you didn’t like Aftermath because there are some gay characters in it, you need to reevaluate every single thing about your failed mess of a life.  You are terrible.  The good news is, you can stop.  And you should.

I am told that there are five gay characters out of the dozens in the book.  Here is how terribly gay they are: one mentions toward the end of the book that he is not into women.  Technically, this doesn’t even mean he’s gay.  He could be asexual for all we know, or perhaps just not into bounty hunters and finding an excuse.  One character has a gay aunt, and he has intermittently lived with her and her partner for the last several years.  They get a little domestic scene or two.  There is supposedly a gay male couple as well; they have such a strong impact on the narrative with their gay gayness and their shoving gay down the throats of the nongay that I managed to miss them entirely.  I only know they’re there because I’ve seen people complaining about them.  I musta missed a pronoun somewhere, probably in one of the interludes.

If you don’t like this book because there are some gay characters sprinkled among the huge majority of straight characters, this is you:

43_luke_02

And I don’t mean “the hero of the series,” by the way, I mean the second whiniest scene in film history, and I’m only using this one because the Tosche Station scene doesn’t have as much of a poutywhinyface as this one does.

Now stop it.

I’m not telling anyone they have to like, or even read, this book.  It has weaknesses; chief among them is a problem that slays many would-be Star Wars writers: the deadly problem of the figure of speech.  Wendig bounces back and forth between English figures of speech that reference animals and situations that, as far as we know, don’t exist in Star Wars (he may not actually say “raining cats and dogs,” but that’s the type of thing I’m talking about) or trying to use English figures of speech but Star Warsing them up in annoying ways (“raining nexus and rancors!”) that are not better.

Like I said earlier:  it’s not my favorite Star Wars book, nor is it my favorite Chuck Wendig book.  But it’s certainly a solid effort that’s well worth the read, which is something I haven’t been able to say about any of the other new continuity books (I’m sorry, Kevin!  I love you, really!) and there are a couple of really cool hints about the new movies sprinkled here and there.  Just do yourself a favor and try to strip away as many preconceptions as you can before you read the damn thing.

Including the bigotry.  Definitely get rid of that.  Because it’s dumb, and the back of your head has a slappin’ target affixed to it at the moment.

(*) Where “hung out with” means “had maybe a two-minute conversation and shook his hand, and he was sort of at my booth for a while but it was actually the booth next to mine,” but it’s my blog and I get to overstate my life if I want to.

REBLOG: Star Wars: Aftermath And The Regressive Hate Machine

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Ah, good. Now I don’t have to write this. Because I’ve been thinking about it.

Regarding shutting up, again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

Delilah Dawson has posted a follow-up to the post that got me all het up the other day, and it is completely and 100% correct.  So go read it, and then we can all lie together in a happiness pile.

Also, Chuck Wendig’s post on the same topic is full of yes.zqiiizvq6rtlw6f1s2no