Death Warmed Over by Kevin J. Anderson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Didn’t like this one, almost from the beginning. And since I didn’t like it, my review’s going to be harsh. I mean, I’ll forgive poor writing if I’m enjoying the read. But this was tough for me to even finish. And yes, saying this is “poor writing” might be a bit much. Honestly, if it weren’t for some of the subject matter, I would have assumed this was written for teenagers. Sorry, teenagers, I don’t mean to insult you. But you know how people write down to the young, and that’s what this read like.
Meandering plot, until things sort of linked up– almost as if the author, Kevin J. Anderson, was just writing whatever, and attaching loose ends together as he went along. Maybe that’s fine for deeply introspective drama, but not for light-hearted genre fiction (in my opinion). There’s no real plot, or, if you insist that there is a mystery that was to be solved, fine– there’s certainly no story. Just the main character explaining how the world is now that “unnaturals” have become a normal part of society. No rising action. Just a series of occurrences that get jammed together at the end.
And Anderson doesn’t even do anything interesting with these “unnaturals.” The main character is a zombie, which is only exploited once in the whole novel. His girlfriend’s a ghost, which adds a tiny bit of tension but, again, it’s un-utilized and in the end, pointless. There’s vampires, werewolves… and now that I think about it, not much else.
There are also humans who hate the unnaturals, which Anderson uses for the so-called plot, taking a subject like racism and turning it into something goofy and flat. Towards the end, this serves as the motivation for the “mystery” which isn’t really a mystery because it’s so obvious what’s going on, one wonders how much respect Anderson has for his main character.
Or his reader, I guess. The whole thing felt like Anderson got an idea he thought was clever, and decided that cleverness, alone, was enough reason to write a book. Well, maybe it is. But is it enough reason to read a book? My reading experience is telling me no.