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Bezig met laden... Crookeddoor Austin Grossman
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. It's all about characters and relationships. ( ) The first half, in which many of the elements are vague and Lovecraftian, is good. Recasting Nixon as protagonist-by-default for darkly sorcerous reasons is a decent basis for a narrative, but the second act's desire to explain and tidy up historical events mostly fails. There just isn't enough connective tissue to explain the naif of the first act behaving as he does in the back half. The prose is lively with some great lines, but those, also, are mostly front-loaded in the book. 'Soon I Will Be Invincible' is still one of my favorite books and, unfortunately for Mr. Grossman, I think that I have unnaturally high expectations of his work because of it. Hell, it's been long enough since I've read '...Invincible' that I may have made it into something it's not; it may, in fact, be mediocre. Nonetheless, that book--or the version of it in my head--has led me to expect brilliant-genius-amazingness from Grossman and I didn't get that here. 'Crooked' was funny--it's about Nixon, who, to me, is just rather inherently funny anyway--and the conceit at its core was clever, but, well, I kept waiting for more. I wanted more of the horror plotline. I wanted more demons or ghosts or zombies or inter-dimensional beings or whatever they were. Instead, it was a lot of Nixon bumbling his way through his career and being made sort-of aware of this global supernatural cold war and, yeah, the book is told in first person so it's impossible for the reader to know any more than Nixon himself, but it just felt like there was something missing. 'Crooked' had the potential to be a great horror comedy, but kept too much of the horror un-revealed and took itself too seriously to ever reach the heights of which it seemed capable. And I would have loved more of the kick-ass Pat Nixon of the last third or so of the book. She was awesome. Like most recent books that create a counterfactual history of a U.S. President, injecting supernatural conspiracy elements, this one starts stronger than it ends. The voice matches Nixon's perfectly, and sucks you in nicely. The ending fizzles a bit, sort of like Nixon himself, I suppose. This doesn't make my recommended list for everyone, but people into Lovecraft (or Nixon) could do a lot worse. Grossman has written an engrossing book that defies description. A (wholly inadequate) summary of the premise is: what if the Cold War arms race included dark magic in addition to nuclear weapons? The best description I can come up with is an incredible mixture of American Gods, The Rook, Hellboy, and Watchmen. Perhaps most incredibly, Grossman casts Nixon as an engaging and multifaceted anti-hero. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Award-winning novelist Austin Grossman reimagines the Cold War as an epic battle against the occult waged by the ultimate American antihero: Richard Nixon. Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all? Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up. What if our nation's worst president was actually a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest? In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could reimagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps, and a presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman's novel is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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