Last night I finished reading Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, a novel by a Buzzfeed writer that would have been a lot more enjoyable if it had been just the first chapter. There’s some interesting ideas in there and some wilfully amusing abuses of science, but pretty quickly the plot degenerates into this-happened-and-then-this-happened-and-then-this-happened, as though the big reveal isn’t a twist in the plot, so much as the story is being written by an 8 year old with no attention span.
It starts well; there’s a young woman, Zoey Ashe, being stalked by a psychopath who’s had his jaw rebuilt so he can bite through metal piping. (Shades here of the misdirection of the opening chapter of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.) She is rescued from death-via-Youtube by a self-driving car that’s been taken over by a mysterious person, and then goes to Tabula Rasa, a city in the desert where she dicvoers she had an enormous legacy bequeathed by her dead, dead terrible father. And then … and then it just goes on and on and on without really having a cohesive direction, half-hearted swipes at comic book stereotypes and occasional attempts to make statements about how dreadful human trafficking is (are there books that propose human trafficking is a Good Thing?), terrible tonal shifts (Zoey being tortured with barbed wire and kicked half to death is one such lowlight) and then banal dialogue and similes that are so bad you can’t be sure if they’re being done on purpose or if the author has a tin ear. For example, there’s a hotel that looked
like something out of a fantasy novel
It looked like a dragon? Like Arnold Schwarzenegger? Like an elf? And that’s before we get onto the ‘Astin Martin’ that’s parked in the garage. Proofreading, anyone?
I would have been maddened enough to fling it across the room and discard it, but that would have broken my Kindle, and when you’ve nothing to do apart from wait for your child to vomit, you may as well read on. Is that damning by faint praise?