Ending the month with the last of the four JDM books I had on
hand. (In between CONTRARY PLEASURE and this one I read THE
CROSSROADS, which was pretty unremarkable, in my opinion.)
This, luckily, is very fine -- the best of the four. It ranks
with SOFT TOUCH, THE END OF THE NIGHT, and A FLASH OF GREEN
as the best non-McGee JDM's I've read.
It's got the same basic formula of the other three: a bunch
of disparate people are thrown together by a variety of
circumstances, and a bunch of stuff happens. Here it's a
hurricane -- an inspired touch, I think, since it forces a
kind of drama on the event.
(I liked CONTRARY PLEASURE but found much of the story to be
rather slow.) The characters, for whatever reason, are much
more vivid, too -- reading a lot of JDMs back-to-back you
really do see his formulas at work, but the characters here
just felt truer to me, more "real". He really had all guns
blazing on this one.
(His later bestseller, CONDOMINIUM, now seems to be to be
essentially a longer, inferior rewrite of this. It might be
interesting to read the two side by side.)
It also occurred to me that JDM's real influence has played
out not in hardboiled novels so much as, of all things,
horror books. By way of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, I
suspect, both of whom are JDM fans. Hell, THE STAND is almost
"JDM writes THE LORD OF THE RINGS".
Anyway, highly recommended.
doug
===== Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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