So I found the sample for the book sitting on my Kindle. Enjoyed the prologue and picked it up. I liked it, but it's very much a book where you enjoy the antics of the main duo and ignore the story, because it's clearly being made up as it goes along. It's really three stories and an oddly too-long epilogue sort of stitched together to try and form a narrative, with the reporter arc holding it all together. Each of the stories is really an independent entity and it really feels like the author wrote one, realised it wasn't long enough and so pushed on to the next. The first story is also the strongest. It's the one where you get a feeling that you kind of get the rules of the game, even though there appears to be at least one instance where they are broken by the author. Still, you sort of get it and it's a satisfying journey from start to finish. I don't really remember the second story, I think it was pretty short. The third story sort of tries to tie everything together, but really you can see at this point the author has sort of given up and just throws more and more weird shit at you in an attempt to overwhelm your thinking. Really though, it's about Dave and John and the running stream of concious that Dave emits throughout. There's probably a name for the generation he's supposed to be, but I'd put it as a mix between "Oh god, make it stop!" and a cynical "I'm just tired of this endless bullshit" character. Him and John are what keep things moving, they play off one another really well and you read the book for them and what weird shit they're going to ignore next. The epilogue is strange because it feels like it runs on too long. The reporter arc is tied up, but then another adventure is sort of tacked on to slip in a predictable joke about the make-up of the hero's party in modern media, and then it stops on a further epilogue which might tie into something earlier but I could no longer recall by this point. I see it's a film now, though iMDB suggests it's not the greatest which is a shame because I thought that, handled well, this could have made for a really good film (presumably they'd only use the first of the three stories). To cut this rambling short, I really quite enjoyed it, but don't go in it for the story. And the Kindle sample is a good representation of what you're in for.
You might want to put book or movie in your title, since the film just came out (well, not quite in theaters yet, but they're doing one of those pre-release on-demand things.)
Well there's no way to edit the title that I know of, but the opening sentence says which I'm talking about.
I tried to read this book and made it most of the way through Two thirds? three quarters? Something like that. I eventually quit because of what you say, Quitch: it's just meandering and plotless for the most part. I felt like I had gotten what I was going to get out of it.
Ah! Thank you so much for reminding me about the sequel! I'm afraid I had totally forgotten. /Adds to THE LIST
