While in Bali recently, I found a used-book store and wanted to grab something for the poolside and for the long plane ride back home. Everything in the store was sunbaked and old, but I found this James Patterson novel and thought I’d give it a try. I’ve only read the guy once before in The President is Missing, co-authored with Bill Clinton, a book I found suspenseful enough, so I thought I’d give this a try.
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The story is interesting but so beyond reason I never really felt the suspense. While this story contains no aliens or supernatural events, it’s sci-fi in the vein of Jurassic Park: animals have become a threat to human existence, because of how humans have manipulated the natural world, and it’s up to one guy to convince the rest that humanity will go extinct unless they do something drastic. I’ve never read Pet Cemetary or Cujo or any of those classic animal-attack books, but I have read Congo and The Lost World, and I’ve gotta say that this is absolutely not my genre. I don’t know how I managed to finish them all in the first place, and I don’t really see myself every going back to this type of story.
The book is hailed as “a rollercoaster of a thrill ride” and praised for its speed, but I’ve got to take issue with that sensation. The book is fast-paced, yes, because its chapters are short and sometimes cut off mid-paragraph. It’s kind of cheating. The book is 98 chapters and 367 pages long. With all the extra white space he gets for stopping the chapters whenever he pleases, Patterson boosts his page count by probably sixty pages or so. It’s a joke.
From this writer’s perspective (and I bet from the perspective of any writing teacher out there), Patterson also kind of sucks as a writer, at least in terms of realism (plot points aside). His POV keeps shifting throughout the book, chapter-to-chapter, and sometimes even within a single chapter. He overuses cliches (like the plague), adds ridiculous IM-type wording inside his prose (ha-ha), and seems to have learned his horrendous “street language” from quick Google searches (what a spazoid). It’s laughable. Yet he’s famous. I don’t get it. Are people that hard up for quality books that they have to keep giving this guy (or at least his ghost writers) business?
For another airplane read, I may find myself trying another of his stand-alone novels—just possibly to disprove my first impressions—but I get a sense that whatever “James Patterson” novel I pick up next, I won’t actually be reading a James Patterson novel. With as many co-authors as he has on his extensive bibliography, I doubt that he writes very much. Pitching ideas? Sure. Tweaking the system? Absolutely. Sitting down with fingers on the keyboard and mashing out these stories himself? I highly doubt it. Even with The President is Missing, I bet Patterson and Clinton sat down over coffee one day and came up with a rough plot, shot a few e-mails back and forth, and then dumped the whole thing onto a third ghost-writer who actually pieced it all together.
Oh to be “successful”.
©2019 E.T.
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Read More from James Patterson:
- The Zoo (2014)
- The President is Missing (2018, with Bill Clinton)