Since I'm finding no time/interest to write blog entries lately, while spending many hours a day writing website and wiki content, and several more hours working on the wine-themed mystery novel, and since I've got a ridiculous backlog of half-written book/movie reviews, I'm just going to start posting one a day, for the foreseeable future. Finishing up these gives me a decent way to wake up my writing thoughts before I move into more serious work, and provides something for the blog. Two birds, one metaphorical stone!
Today's review is for a book I read at the gym this week, and will have forgotten completely by the weekend.
This book has much better potential and plot ideas than execution, a fact this review will belabor painfully. It's a modern day medical thriller, in which a crazy toxicologist is breeding new plagues and spreading mysterious diseases of his own creation, in a re-enactment of the ten plagues Moses inflicted upon the Egyptians, in Biblical lore. The hero is an eccentric disease researcher who stumbles onto the case about the 6th plague, quickly realizes what's happening, and starts trying to unravel the earlier cases, predict the upcoming plagues, and figure out who is perpetrating it.
It sounds like a good story; medical intrigue, brilliant doctors scheming and cat-and-mousing each other, pandemics cutting swathes of death through the general public, the FBI and other government agencies stumbling around not sure who to go after, Biblical metaphors and inspiration, clues found in ancient Hebraic scrolls, etc. Unfortunately the novel is very poorly written, with no sense of pacing, a terrible plot delivery (the reader is immediately told who the bad guy, what he's doing, and why, which sucks almost all of the intrigue and suspense out of the novel), boring cliché characters, clumsy flashbacks, unnecessary and silly sexual deviancy, etc. The science was pretty solid, but the rest of the book felt slapped together and disjointed.
To the scores:
The Eleventh Plague, by John S. Marr, MD, and John Baldwin
Plot: 4
Concept: 9
Writing Quality/Flow: 4/5
Characters: 4
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 3
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 4
Of the two authors, the doctor got top billing, as the book tries to push its medical credentials to make the future plague scenario believable. I assume that he contributed some general character sketches and lots of scientific and medical info, and the co-author, John Baldwin fleshed it out and made it a novel. I assumed Baldwin was a hired hand, some novelist who hasn't had much success with his own material, who makes ends meet working as a hired pen.
That's basically the case, judging by his
extensive Amazon.com bibliography, but his credits are not what I expected. And they give a clue to the lacking presentation of this novel.
Baldwin's not a novelist! Almost all of his titles are non-fiction, and on almost all he's a co-author. It's a very eclectic selection; lots of history books, but also human sexuality, science, various Biblical studies, the Idiot's Guide to Acting, books on business, human psychology, and many more. The guy is clearly stays quite busy polishing and finalizing other people's books, and must have a fairly broad field of knowledge. He might be a great non-fiction writer; I haven't read any of his other books, so I can't say. But he's not any good as a novelist, neither structurally or creatively, and that's what brought down
The Eleventh Plague.
I've never heard of either author, and I didn't read their bios or the blurb before I started the book (which I got at a library giveaway years ago, and finally got around to reading at the gym this week) but I did notice that it was by a doctor and another guy, and from that I assumed the doctor came up with the science and disease stuff and probably had some character ideas, and the writer whipped it into shape. I still assume that's true, but I wonder if the doctor had more involvement than that... since so much of the book was dry, dull, methodological, etc. And yet there were scattered through it bizarre and jarring bits of weirdness.
The bad guy is largely targeting conservative Christians with his plagues, since he was doing brilliant disease research, but his masterpiece drug could have been used to cause abortions , since it would attack any foreign substance in the body, including a foetus. It seemed an unsatisfactory plot twist, but at any rate, the conservative funding his cancer research flipped out at that and cut him off, then worked to destroy his larger career. For no apparent reason. That embittered the guy, and he eventually started having schizophrenic delusions in which he thought God was talking to him and telling him what to do to take revenge.
(On second though, I don't believe the book ever actually says "God." I think the bad guy always refers to it as "the voice" he hears that tells him what to do. That seems especially gutless, on the part of the authors, in retrospect. Like they couldn't even have their madman murderer psychopath think he was being guided by God. When obviously he would have, given that he was recreating Biblical sourges at the direction of an omniscient directing intellect.)
So he starts brewing up various clever poisons and toxins, and how he makes them and spreads them is some of the more interesting material in the book. Growing deadly algae to create a red tide, engineering anthrax, incubating a tapeworm in order to plant its offspring into people, etc. But that's not enough for the authors. So they have to give him an insanely abusive, devoutly religious mother who tortured him and drove him to bizarre sexual hang-ups. Which play no part in the book except for occasional mentions of his overlarge penis and his inability to ejaculate with a woman, a liability somewhat compensated for by his ability to ejaculate without any physical stimulation, a trick he learned since his mother beat him and burned his hands constantly as a child since she suspected him of masturbating.
More fundamentally, the book is just poorly plotted and paced. The hero doctor finds out about the plagues around #6, and figures out the previous plagues with miraculous speed, partially thanks to the bad guy hacking his computer with magically-disappearing anonymous messages (a talent used just that one time as a plot device, and then never referred to again). But then nothing happens for weeks, until plague #7. And then nothing happens for weeks until plague #8. Etc. There's finally sort of a chase scene and some excitement as the doctor and an FBI agent catch onto what plague #10 will be and rush to try to stop it, but even that's poorly handled.
The structure would have required some considerable re-juggling to turn it into a thriller. It would have been much easier to make it suspenseful though, simply by not revealing the identity, motivation, methodology, and ultimate goals of the madman on like, page 15. It's not meant to be a mystery, and ultimately it's not, but the main hero doctor thinks it's a mystery as he tries to figure out who's doing it (while battling suspicions that it might be him, and skeptics who think he's crazy for trying to fit random events into this Biblical plague framework). But since the reader knows who it is, and we know nothing's going to happen until about the time of the 10th plague, it's kind of pointless to read all the hero doctor's investigative work to uncover facts we knew 50 pages ago.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
It's not a very good book, but it did keep me occupied during my hour of cardio 3 or 4 days in a row. I don't recommend it, but it's far from horrible. It's actually of more interest to aspiring writers, since it's instructive in where things can go wrong. The ingredients for a good (not great) book are clearly here, and as you read it you can't help but think how much better the material might have been presented, by a more expert writer.
I kept envisioning the co-author doctor reading over the rough drafts and checking to be sure his scientific and medical info was accurately presented, while scratching his head at the weird and pointless sexual deviancy here and there, and yawning while he wondered if this was as boring and non-suspenseful as he thought. Before ultimately deferring to the published writer, who, after all, must know what he's doing. (Ironically, while the bad writing is mentioned in numerous of the generally
over-starred Amazon.com reviews, there are numerous comments about errors in the dates of events, medical mistakes, language problems with the Hebraic quotes, etc.)
The irony that I'm currently co-writing a mystery novel set in the wine industry, for which my dad is providing almost all of the technical/wine/industry details is not lost on me, as I write this review.
Labels: book review
