Mon 2 May 2022
Reviews by L. J. Roberts
PAUL DOIRON – Dead by Dawn. Game Warden Mike Bowditch #12. Minotaur Books, hardcover, June 2021. Setting: Contemporary Maine.
First Sentence: The hill is steep here, and there is no guardrail above the river.
Some love books and take great care of them: don’t write in them, or bend down corners. Hardcovers are put in mylar archival covers as soon as they arrive, and the spines are not broken. But not this one. With a print, rather than an e-copy of this book, one would be tempted to rip out the pages out with abandon so they could be reordered in chronological order.
You see, the author decided to write the story alternating between the present, and the very recent past; truly a gap of an hour, perhaps. The story is jumping back and forth like the ball in the championship ping-pong tournament and tends to drive one crazy.
One assumes at some point, the past will with meetup with the present, but one may not wait that long before becoming screamingly frustrated. Not only does the style make the story nearly impossible to read, but it also removes most of the suspense which would have been otherwise palpable. Perhaps if one had a paper copy, they’d skip to the end just to see how it comes out. Frankly, however, no reader should feel the need to do that.
For pity’s sake, what happened to the idea of starting the story at the beginning and carrying it straight through to the end; no prologue, no flashing back and forth, no portents: just tell the bleeding story!
One could nearly conclude that many books written in 2020 were subject to the pandemic rendering too many authors incapable of editing, not rambling, including far more extraneous information than remotely needed, muddling the plot, including every character they can imagine, and falling prey to using devices that drive some readers mad with frustration. Sadly, this is one of those.
Dead by Dawn is heartbreaking. Paul Doiron’s other books with his great characters, information about Maine and being a game warden there, are wonderful to read. Others will love this book and it well may win awards. However, others may find it gimmicky and annoying, and hope his next book returns to telling a cracking story in a straight timeline fashion.
Rating: Not Recommended.
May 2nd, 2022 at 2:50 pm
LJ,
I’m sure I heard the thud against the wall even from here, 3000 miles away!
May 2nd, 2022 at 4:49 pm
Even with an e-book, Steve?
“Perhaps if one had a paper copy, they’d skip to the end just to see how it comes out. Frankly, however, no reader should feel the need to do that.”
The best argument I know for standard chronology (and paper books) I know is put by the character in Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men who “read novels back to front. He could not bear the thought, when he picked up a novel, of suffering the author’s tedious assumption in the early chapters that he knew nothing about the characters and would have to be introduced to them. … There was just a chance that might be able to face being introduced to a novelist’s characters after he had discovered whether they finished up dead, married, or resigned to life. But then there wasn’t much interest in learning that someone you knew nothing about was dead, married, or resigned to anything.”
May 2nd, 2022 at 5:04 pm
Sure. Even more so! Those Kindles are made out of stout stuff.
May 2nd, 2022 at 5:46 pm
I did have the hard copy as well as the e-book. I may not have tossed it across the room, but there was considerable profanity directly toward the author as I threw it into the bag of books to be donated. The worst thing about reading a book in which one is so disappointed is that it makes one hesitate about reading the next book. I still haven’t decided.
Roger – There was one book where I cheated by reading the ending as I’d heard the main character died and wanted to be prepared. It didn’t help as I still cried like a baby when it happened. It’s a good author who can elicit that level of emotion.
May 2nd, 2022 at 8:06 pm
When a writer wants to get clever with timelines and chronology in a novel the problem is the actual need is that he is clever about it and keeps the reader involved in the game.
It sounds here like a failed experiment.
There are fine books by good writers who pull this off and actually enhance the enjoyment of the reader, but it is hard to really enjoy a book when you are struggling to keep up with basics like the timeline.
I won’t fully blame the writer here since the days when an editor actually edited seems to have passed at many publishing houses and the writer is expected to deliver a manuscript fully copy edited and all the hard editorial work done by Beta Readers and not paid professionals who actually know something about writing (if you aren’t lucky enough to have professionals willing to act as your Beta Reader you are pretty much on your own).
Writer’s experiment, it’s their nature, the nature of editors used to be reining writers in when they stumbled or got it wrong.
May 3rd, 2022 at 8:27 am
Too bad, because I really liked the first book and mean to read the rest of them (thanks for the reminder, LJ, as this series slipped my mind), but yes, I hate those kinds of stupid gimmicky writing too. You see it on television all the time. You’re watching an exciting scene in episode one of new show, and suddenly the dreaded words come on the screen: “THREE DAYS AGO” or “NINE MONTHS EARLIER” (this was in OUTER RANGE, I think), or even “THREE HOURS EARLIER.”
Just stop it!