Author: Michael Scott
Author: Colette Freedman
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WARTY!
This was read by Kate Reading. I begun it thinking how perfect a name is that for the reader of an audio book?! Unfortunately, her style grated after a while. It's got to be said that this is one of the very worst novels I've never read. I got to fifty chapters in - which is not as far as you'd think (the chapters are laughably short) - but it is over half-way through. I started listening to it and found myself skipping track after track on the audio disks because the writing was so unbelievably pedestrian and monotonous that was unbearable on my ears: it actually hurt my brain to listen to it. This novel reads like a self-published first novel, which is really disturbing because it was written by at least one author (Scott) who is a seasoned and talented writer. He's the author of The Alchemyst hexalogy which I really enjoyed.
I'm not at all familiar with Colette Freedman, but I was looking forward to starting this audio book when I drove to work in the morning, and the disappointment came thick and fast. It's funny that I was talking about show vs. tell (or inform vs. evoke as some would have it) in a couple of reviews lately. To me it's show or blow. Scott & Freedman blowed. They dump massive quantities of info in the first three disks, much of which really has diddly squat to do with the actual story. Yeah, I am suitably impressed that you created a back-story for every last one of your minor characters, but I sure as hell don't need to hear it breaking through the narrative and taking over large swathes of the novel like kudzu.
Just in passing, the thirteen hallows are derived from Celtic mythology, and also appear to have fed the Harry Potter series, at least in part. Clearly the 'hallows' portion of the title is nothing more than a shameful rip-off of J. K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out four years before. The Thirteen Hallows is nothing but splatter-punk bait-and-switch under the false pretense of being a supernatural thriller. None of it makes any sense. The premise is that there are thirteen hallows of Britain (this is true, although they're better known as 'treasures') and there are two evil morons (they're clearly not geniuses otherwise they would pursue their treasure hunt much more intelligently than they do) who are seeking these thirteen treasures which, once united, will allow one of them to rule the world.
Evidently, these treasures are keys to unlock a portal which would allow demons to come through and eat people(!). What would be left to rule when everyone was eaten is unexplained. Why these keys were not destroyed thereby permanently sealing up the demons is unexplained. Why demons even want to eat people is unexplained. Why these thirteen keys are 'guarded' by thirteen really old people with no provision to pass on their dubious legacy to the next generation is unexplained. Why the hallows were entrusted to these people when they were kids who were so defenseless that they'd been evacuated from London during the World War Two bombings is unexplained. Why only two detectives are put in charge of a major murder investigation into what has to be the ostensible work of a dangerous, deranged, and very violent psychopath is unexplained. Why they can't apprehend the perps is completely understandable given how inexperienced and utterly inept they are. Why the gods (or any god) cannot step in and prevent this horror - yet again having to rely on weak and fallible humans to do their dirty work - is unexplained. But given that religion is the most asinine aspect of this fiction - or any fiction including the Bible - this latter item is not really a mystery at all. How this novel ever made it to publication is a mystery.
Even within its own framework, this novel makes zero sense. The two bad guys have several "skinheads" running around London doing their slaughtering, and every scene of slaughter is depicted in the most nauseating terms imaginable, describing, in tabloid detail, all of the horror, the gore, the blood, and the abominable smells. Yet when Sarah, the female protagonist of a matching pair guts one of the villains (completely out of the blue!) with a sword, another of the bad guys vomits from the horror of it. Honestly? This is a guy who is torturing people for a living, and has waded through spongy, sticky, blood-soaked carpet in pursuit of his work, and yet he vomits because a colleague is stabbed?
I know that Scott can write. I loved his Alchemyst series. So how are we to explain how unutterably bad this novel is? Do we blame it all on Freedman? That would seem to be the obvious knee-jerk reaction, but it may be that she's equally competent, so then we would have to blame poor chemistry or willful blindness. Are Scott and Freedman doing nothing more than writing about their own dark fantasies - are they seeing themselves as the blood-lusting bad guys here? I have no idea, which is to say that I have just as much idea about that as I do about how such a god-awfully bad novel ever got past any self-respecting editor. I did find that some chapters seemed to me to evidence having been be written by Freedman, whereas others seemed to have been written by Scott. This came to me solely from the tone, and I have no idea at all if I'm even remotely right, but it was an interesting sensation that I very likely would not even have experienced had I been reading a print book or ebook.
The writing is pedestrian to an extreme, every single line is a tell with nary a show in sight, as the authors parade one gory scene past us after another, and every last one of these scenes is described in almost exactly the same terms and in mind-numbingly unnecessary detail. The authors quite evidently have no idea how to invoke shock, horror, and revulsion without describing it in terms which a ten-year-old might employ to show how tough he is or to gross out his school chums.
I found myself skipping track after track on the first five disks (which is as much as I could stomach of this trash) because I had no interest whatsoever in the life history of Mrs Piddly-Ass Smythe, or whoever. I really didn't. Can we get into the story please?! So note form this that even seasoned authors quite evidently don't give a damn about show vs tell, rest assured. When we finally got to one of the main characters, and her name turned out to be Mary Sue Clueless. After she rescued an old woman from being mugged and took her to her home in the city of Bath (not exactly next door to London!), they found the home had been savagely and disgustingly vandalized. The next morning, Mary Sue got a threatening phone call at work, yet she failed to call the police! She goes to her own home after that, only to find her whole family slaughtered!
I have one more thing to say about the disks - the first one at least: there was this weird vibration sound on the end of disk one, and I initially thought there was something wrong with my car! It wasn't until I turned down the CD player volume to hear better, and the sound faded that I realized it was on the CD!
Another annoyance (for the audio book) was the lack of "chapter ...". I guess the printed novel has just numbers without the word "Chapter" in front, and Reading was simply reading as is without thinking of artificially adding the word "Chapter" to preface the number. Would it be too much to ask? It took some getting used to hearing what at first appeared to be a random number or appeared to be part of the narrative, only to learn after a second that we'd actually begun a new chapter! Yeah, it's a minor quibble, but it's an unnecessary annoyance.
In short, this novel is WARTY to the max.
