RARA-AVIS: JDM'S *The End of the Night*

From: Bludis Jack ( buildsnburns@yahoo.com)
Date: 21 Jun 2003


Al Guthrie said of *The End of the Night*:

<<it's nobody's story, which is okay in a thriller, but this isn't a thriller. It's convincing enough, just a bit dull. Possibly a mistake to begin with the executions. Ruined what would otherwise have been some badly needed suspense.>>

I agree with Al that the book needed suspense and that it was a mistake to begin with the executions. What I don't agree with is his comment that it was "nobody's story."

I felt that it was clearly Kirby Palmer Stassen the college drop-out's story. Where I thought it went wrong was when JDM juxtaposed the time frame and tried to make Stassen a psychopath in the beginning of the book (which was near the very end of the time frame in real time) and made him both sympathetic and not at all psychopathic at the end of the pre-arrest rampage.

For a while, I thought it was a great book, but it settled back to just "very good."

But of course, we all view a book in different ways and differently from each other, and everybody is right in his assesment.

I'm about halfway through *Dead Low Tide* and it hasn't grabbed me yet--except that JDM has decided not to go for poetic prose in this one.

Jack Bludis

===== http://JackBludis.com

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 21 Jun 2003 EDT