Ah, another two star read in my 6 book purchase from Barnes and Noble.
After my last run in with horror, The Deep, I grabbed this one because it got a shit ton of accolades. Though this is not my first run-in with Stephen Graham Jones. I had read 'Night of the Manequins' by him and was not quite gellin' with the story he was telling there. Yet this one sounded interesting because, Native American protagonists and racial themes.
... I soon realized I came across the same problem I had with his writing in 'Night of the Manequins'. This choppy prose that comes off like someone trying to catch their breath. It's bizarre and I can't think anybody can gain a good visual from it. (I'm a visual person, when I read, what I read on the page flows in my head like a movie. So if you got someone who is writing crappy, it comes across like a DVD with skips or a film reel that has cuts.)
The story is a group of four men decide to do a little hunting in elder territory. They decide to slaughter some elk, and one of the elk in general was to give birth. They mutilated the elk, harvested the skin and meat and ditched the unborn calf. Well, elk returns 10 years later beyond the grave and declares, 'pay back is a bitch and so am I', and starts killing these men off.
I was all for this female elk going to town on these men. Just think if Bambi's mom decided to wake up and go off on the hunter who killed her. We'd be getting a different Bambi 2 than what we got. Anyway. I didn't get that exactly. The 'elk' became a female with an elk head at times, and other time some creepy Samara female. Sometimes the author starts writing in this prose that he is 'talking' to the elk female, like he is some strange sportscaster giving us and her some play by play.
The last fourth of the book, the author then decides to ditch all of that and focuses on the daughter of one of the four men (who has popped up here and there through the story). The prose actually becomes fluid and the imagery makes sense. Though the plot of the story gets weird. (view spoiler) There is a touching moment at the end, where the daughter does something that her stupid father and his friends should had done a long time ago.
All in all, there was some interesting themes in this book, but this yippie-dippy prose that the author gives sometimes really takes me out of the book. Clearly if he could write the last bit of the book with sense, then, there was no need for it for 85% of the book.
After my last run in with horror, The Deep, I grabbed this one because it got a shit ton of accolades. Though this is not my first run-in with Stephen Graham Jones. I had read 'Night of the Manequins' by him and was not quite gellin' with the story he was telling there. Yet this one sounded interesting because, Native American protagonists and racial themes.
... I soon realized I came across the same problem I had with his writing in 'Night of the Manequins'. This choppy prose that comes off like someone trying to catch their breath. It's bizarre and I can't think anybody can gain a good visual from it. (I'm a visual person, when I read, what I read on the page flows in my head like a movie. So if you got someone who is writing crappy, it comes across like a DVD with skips or a film reel that has cuts.)
The story is a group of four men decide to do a little hunting in elder territory. They decide to slaughter some elk, and one of the elk in general was to give birth. They mutilated the elk, harvested the skin and meat and ditched the unborn calf. Well, elk returns 10 years later beyond the grave and declares, 'pay back is a bitch and so am I', and starts killing these men off.
I was all for this female elk going to town on these men. Just think if Bambi's mom decided to wake up and go off on the hunter who killed her. We'd be getting a different Bambi 2 than what we got. Anyway. I didn't get that exactly. The 'elk' became a female with an elk head at times, and other time some creepy Samara female. Sometimes the author starts writing in this prose that he is 'talking' to the elk female, like he is some strange sportscaster giving us and her some play by play.
The last fourth of the book, the author then decides to ditch all of that and focuses on the daughter of one of the four men (who has popped up here and there through the story). The prose actually becomes fluid and the imagery makes sense. Though the plot of the story gets weird. (view spoiler) There is a touching moment at the end, where the daughter does something that her stupid father and his friends should had done a long time ago.
All in all, there was some interesting themes in this book, but this yippie-dippy prose that the author gives sometimes really takes me out of the book. Clearly if he could write the last bit of the book with sense, then, there was no need for it for 85% of the book.