David Turton

Malaise

Kelsey Lynn

** spoiler alert **
           I've been sitting on this ARC I received from Netgalley accidentally for a while. I didn't mean to, I just thought I was caught up and found out... I wasn't. So I reread the description and got excited. A story about an apocalyptic event? Technology-based futuristic society not unlike the one we're headed to? Check and Check, sign me up, this is my kind of story.
 
 Unfortunately, I'll have to make this a spoiler review as it's too hard for me to write my pure disappointment without spoilers. A warning, I tend to go stream of consciousness, I'm not a writer, so there may be grammatical errors abound, so bear with me and strap in. 

 There was... a lot wrong with this book. I would argue the biggest places were pacing, the sheer amount of exposistion (over 70% of the book), the rushed unbelieveable end (8% of the book) and the long boring bits (22% of the book). He was inconsistant in writing, unoriginal with his descriptions, repeated himself A LOT. Also it just felt like he didn't research, at all, anything. The writing was meh, the characters were cardboard, the dialogue and interaction was cringeworthy and unrealistic. On top of it all it suffered from bullet point disease, he had certain parts you could tell he was certian of, he planned in advance, but then kind of found the inbetween as he went. It didn't work.

 Our story opens with an interview with Rick Razer, the Steve Jobs of the future, someone who pioneered advancement in tech. Not just any tech, all tech, finally unifying the wearables, watchables, playables etc that we have already started dabbling in today. RazorVision is the unifying feature, what Google was hoping for with Google Glass, something that augments our reality and brings all our tech together, telling us our stats, showing us our socials, and all around improving our lives. Or so we think. Turton opens up with a very honest approach, discussing the issues with privacy and data, and making it clear this Rick Razor doesn't really care. Sold data means ads get to the right people, the benifets outway the negatives. He even gives this tech away for free as he wants to help improve humanity. Honestly, Turton sets this guy up to be a pretty stand up guy. 
 
 Our main character however is Mike Pilkington, a university professor that specializes essentitially in Rick Razor, well his tech at least. He is a staunch supporter of the tech advancements, and is pretty unreasonable with those who don't (as seen with his student Simon, someone set up to be important, but... well I'll get to that later). After a lecture one day, his students show him a viral video, one that they say give them a high like cocaine or something, as a University professor myself, the weird stuff my students show me makes this suprisingly realistic. He watches it, it makes him feel weird, commence paragraphs upon paragraphs of him reminescing about when he used LSD once and what kind of weird he felt, when honestly a "oh, I don't like that" would have sufficed. But whatever. It makes him feel so weird he takes his razortech bike and leaves the razorteched school (it really read like this, he wanted to REALLY make it clear how much Razor was involved with everything). He took these things, angerly called Simon on his RazorVision to give him a piece of his mind about his opinion, while riding a bike (now this is NOT standard professor stuff, I'm close with some of my students, and after they graduate can see myself friends with them, but I would NEVER and have never known a peer to, call a student because I disagreed with them). After his fruitless call, he goes to a pub and gets shitfaced while debating with a super cool antitech dude who just casually after a peer shows him his bunker. (Chekov's Gun much?). But then he remembers, oh yea, I have a wife and 2 month old. Goes home, fights, shows his wife the video, thinks way too long about how much he loves her and has passionate sex.

 However in the night, the world goes to hell in a handbasket. Post people who viewed his video go zombie crazy and start murdering everyone. He escapes to bar with his 2 month old, and rather than saving the man who runs it, watches him die and takes his bunker. Well to be honest, the guy told him to get in the bunker and while stashing little baby girl, the dude died, but still. They proceed to stay down there for 8 WEEKS, even though later the book makes it clear that the madness ended in less than 24hrs. He had a window to the outside, you'd think he'd notice it had calmed down? I dunno, that's just a personal meh, nothing wrong with the writing, I just don't get it. With broken ribs and a 2 month old, I feel like I would've tried to find help. He leaves the bunker finally, immediatley finds the nicest couple in the world. Seriously every character is the same in this book, all sickenly perfect humans, never a bad thought, even when it is thoughts. He immediatly goes back to this couple place, and then 16 freakin years pass.
 No joke, it jumps forward 16 years. Ok, whatever, the plot doesn't take place in the present, it's fine, the author will have a good reason to jump ahead. But dear reader, he didn't. There was literally no reason to jump ahead, beyond little baby Zara being grown up. Growing up in a tech free world. Something that the story hints will be important, but literally is not. You could cut Zara out of this book and it'd progress the same way. She brought nothing to the table. Even though he found two people immediately after leaving his bunker, apparently it hasn't been so smooth since, and they've formed a community with a handful of other survivors who slowly couple up and make babies, for a total community size of I believe 18.
 
 Now this community. Every single person is WELL RESPECTED in this community, each one. Every single page long description of every single character talked about how WELL RESPECTED they are, and used those words. Everyone had a tragic backstory (understadable and not an issue) but had found solace in this community. They all were the exact same. Super nice, kind, talented. No bad apples, not one in the bunch. The princess of them all (and she was described as a princess at one point) is Zara. Lovely, sweet, limber, musculer, lean, built, Zara. Sweet as honey, everyone treats her like family. But she's lonely, as there is noone her age (even though.. there is one boy 2 years younger but he never gets mentioned again). Now Zara is the definition of all talk no action. Everyone builds her up so much. At one point she goes on mission outside the community, smokes some pot, looks around, talks to the people she's with, becomes so desperate she starts seeing someone twice her age as attractive. Comes home and everyone raaaaaves about how awesome she is, she was amazing at it, she kept them safe, they didn't know what they'd do without her. But she didn't do anything. Let alone anything more than those she was with. The only point of tension and action was a man falling off his bike. But man oh man is she special and strong, and limber and musculer (seriously give Mr. Turton a thesaurus). 

 After the bike incident proved fatal. The group goes out to find a doctor. They magically in the first place they go to find a doctor and a nurse. Sweet. They think about how lucky they are rather than how poorly written that is. But don't you worry, the author has something up his sleeve to make up for it. Insert eyeroll. Well in the like 5 hours since meeting, our Mike has decided he is head over heels in love with the doctor. Like they've known each other less than a day and are snoggin. Well one of the new people (there are a doctor, a nurse, and two others) is apparently her ex, and is mad. So he shoots one of the only interesting characters in the book and then shoots himself. This is the equivelant of a horror movie shooting itself in the foot by showing their terrible cg monster. It accomplished nothing, only was covering up their lack of a creative solution to the situation, and made me as a reader take the book a lot less seriosuly. 
 
 So what does the group do? They get home and decide to leave to find out if Rick Razor really did cause all this with the video. Oh and because Mike and the Doctor are in love now she's coming. The doctor, who a very WELL RESPECTED member of the community died to get, is going to leave to satisfy her new beau's curiostity. This is where I just lost it. None of this was believeable, none of this made any sort of sense, a relationship of a few days does not cause this. Also this is where things started becoming extremely inconsistant. In show of welcome, the community invites the newbies to join... the founders commitee. But... everyone after Mike and the couple were all new, with this logic EVERY SINGLE TOWNSPERSON would be on that commitee. But, whatever. Mike and the Doctor also get married, the first marriage in the community! Wait a second, they've had numerous marriages. The man who just died killed his wife during the night of terror and remarried and had 4 kids while in the community. So... I guess they don't matter? Mike and Doctor are the first. Whatever. 
 
 So Doctor, Mike and Zara take off to figure out what happened to the world. If you feel like I spent a long time on this, so do I. It was about 71% of the book. No joke, just check my Kindle, they leave town at 71% through. They leave town, they have no issues on the road. They have two side stories, both standard predictable fair. One a crazy man whose locked up his zombified wife and daughter for 16 years. Not only has this been done a 1000 times before, but very recently in pop culture to the release of this book with the Walking Dead season 2. Then they encounter a group of guys on the road who immediately try and rape Zara *yawn*, every apocalypse story ever. I think the author thought he was being original by adding how Zara enjoyed the attention before it was too much, which is refreshing. They take off in a car the guys had cause they found some gasoline (which can only last stored properly up to 6 months.. but yea 16 years later sure.... RESEARCH, this one is a common misconception in apocalypse stories, however, yet another recent pop culture show "The last man on Earth" finally commented on that easily researched yet overlooked fact).

 So, pointless, non plot propelling side stories done, we progress to the ACTUAL plot. But wait a second...we are now at 83% of the book. So whatever is about to go down, is going to go down fast. Now the book has been hinting throughout that Rick Razor had had some big gameplan to fix the growing seperation of wealth. It's hinted that this video was a unifier and would be his solution. It was very much suggested he had a gameplan, and established he was a smart man, so what comes next was so... freaking dumb I can't control my rage at wasting my time reading it. They come to the Razor tower, they enter, and rather than finding Rick Razor waiting to we awaken the world or having succumbed to his own equalizer. They find, and I can't even try to be nice. A cult, he's somehow become a psychopath, with no build up in the 50% exposistion to this. His idea of the great equalizer was to create a cult (oh by the way Simon's there! The one that hated Tech! oh wait, now he's dead, so he didn't matter at all). This cult goes against everything Razor talked about prior, and even during their time there. His great equalizer event was meant to clear the world so he could bang a bunch of chicks and populate the world with his babies. For REAL THAT WAS THE AUTHOR'S SOLUTION. A very smart man thinking that could work somehow. Incest asside, what? So he's created this community where everyone has to have their boobs out and have sex with him. Then in the equivelant of the villian explaining the plan to the hero, he tells them his twin boys know the passcode and it requires his retinas to restart the tech. Oh by the way, one of the twins is in love with Zara, they met five minutes ago, but whatever, he's in love with her and wants to help her escape and wants to go with her. But rather than get anyones hands dirty, lets introduce a hypnotist, the one that made the video, and convince him in 60 seconds he feels so guilty he needs to kill Rick Razor, so he does. So now, they've got a full building of cultists with no leader, an evil twin, a good twin, and our little family of Zara, Mike and the Doctor. Shits about to go down. They gotta escape right? 
 
 Oh... I guess not. It's the epilogue and Zara is pregnant with good twins baby. Bad twin fishes his dad's eyes out of the river. Now, let's revisit the research complaint again. I don't quite know how Razor's tech worked in regard to a retina scan. BUT Eyes begin clouding over in a matter of hours after death. So fishing them out of the river months later as implied by this epilogue (very preggo and married Zara) would be fruitless. Retinae cease to do anything once they are severed from the brain, meaning death or ripping them out of the head would mean they aren't doing anything. Regardless of the clouding over the issue. MONTHS later there probably wouldn't be any eyes left.
ANNND the book is over. That's how quick it happened. It was so quick, and so freaking bad. Like I haven't felt a book was this bad since "Book of the Unnamed Midwife". 
 
 I'm sure it doens't help that I read Butler's Parables recently which are amazingly written books telling the story of a growing community living in the wastelands of humanity. Seriously amazing books. If you hated this book as much as me read them. If you LIKED this book READ THEM so you can see what a good version is. 

 This book was so horribly written. Every character was a cardboard cutout cut to the same shape with a different image printed on it. Absolutely nothing advanced the plot. I never felt compelled beyond my own obsession with finishing what I started to continue the book. Even when the author did attempt to make us care about a character there was no purpose, no one was put in danger, there was no action or concern or anything. The "Suicide mission" of going to Razor tower wasn't really though, immediately they had people do it for them. Zara did ABSOLUTELY nothing this whole book, except exist. If you removed her, you would not miss her, and some of the cringiest moments would be gone. 

 One of the things I ask my student during critiques (Illustration Department) is "If it was gone would you miss it?" To point out when they are doing superfluous things, or over-complicating, or bogging down their good work with garbage. This book was 99% that. I would not miss 99% of what happened in this book. I would miss the concept. A solid and interesting one. Horribly executed by an author that couldn't even be bothered to research how many deer are in a herd, cause it's not "dozens".

Malaise

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