Re: RARA-AVIS: God is a Bullet Release.

Jacques Oppinger (joppinger@hotmail.com)
Sat, 27 Mar 1999 22:43:13 PST Fred Willard wrote:

>A few months ago I wrote on the list about a great manuscript I had
read
>for comment. It's has now been released.
>
>The books is _God is a Bullet_ by Boston Teran.
>
>I don't have any connection with Teran, his publisher, agent, his dog
or
>anything else, so this post is primarily a service to people on the
list.
>(Although, I gave the book a rave response, turned Bill Diehl onto it,
he
>went crazy over it and started calling his friends, they called their
>friends, and the buzz is still building.)
>
>My suggestion is that you buy this book immediatly, read it, and be
>prepared to have it knock you on your rear end, It's an outstanding
hard
>boiled read.
>
>Trust me on this. It's an incredible novel and has the best hard boiled
>female character I've ever read. Teran writes with a blow torch.
>
>Fred Willard

A dissenting opinion here.

I had kept Mr. Willard's raves in mind for the last few weeks and was
excited when a colleague (fellow book store manager) recieved an advance
copy at her store and, having remembered my interest in it, rushed it
over to me.

OK, so I didn't hate it, but it surely didn't blow me away. Great use of
setting. You could almost feel the dust of the California (Mexicali)
desert kicking up as you turned the pages. The unflinching graphic stuff
is certainly there. The "villian" struck me as cartoonish. The female
hard-boiled charater mentioned above is recovering-junkie-ex-cult-member
whose speech appears to be restricted to metaphor. The writing in
general is quite good and he certainly manages to turn the nifty phrase
here and there (never stops trying at least), but after 300+ pages Mr.
Teran's particular brand of word-play became ponderous for me, to say
the least. He's blurbed like the second coming but falls a little short
of the buzz, imo.

I'm mostly a lurker and not much of a critic (obvious, that). Mr.
Willard's the pro around here but that's my two cents.

If you want to purchase it because you feel strongly about that sort of
thing, go for it. But I've got a copy I'd be willing to part with.

Jacques Oppinger
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