The Big Bad Book

Remind me not to read any more James Patterson books. When I'm ill (like with this cold that I've struggled against now for over two weeks) I tend to raid the library for easy to read thrillers - my favourites are Patricia Cornwell, and lately Tess Gerritsen. Serial killers, police, FBI, forensics, bring it on. I find Stephen King books quite relaxing too, particularly the older ones.

And yet James Patterson... I seem to forget every time how crap a writer he actually is. Somehow he manages to keep a story going, keep me interested, throw in enough of the vaguely interesting detective work and crime-fighting jargon at the same time as I'm retching at his prose. I mean how are these sentences even published?:

I sat there very quietly, and I held in a primal scream that would have shattered all the glass in the office.

The golden rule of writing, Show, don't tell obviously means nothing to this guy.

I can't find the quote now, but he uses the word 'de-spirited'. The word is dispirited, James.

I noticed that in recent years he's co-written several books (I hesitate to call them novels, although in this month of Nanowrimo I guess anything goes), maybe the quality of those is better?

James Patterson is such a prolific writer, and Alex Cross is such a familiar character, that fans, and those new to this series, are bound to enjoy the latest addition to the Alex Cross/Will Lee novels.

Yeah, because we all know the more prolific a writer, the better. Right?

This review snippet from Amazon's German site says it better than I have:

James Patterson is the literary equivalent to a five-course dinner at your local fast-food restaurant. Meaning: it probably won't kill you, but there are certainly better ways to enjoy yourself. Patterson novels come in small bites. There are 121 chapters in 2nd Chance, each of them rarely more than two pages long. So, the book consists of a surprising amount of empty and half-empty pages. This might agree with readers afflicted with a short attention span. They won't have a problem finding the page where they fell asleep the night before. It is rather irritating to readers who are used to regarding a novel's division into chapters...as part of the story's construction. Between the empty pages there is regrettably a lot of mediocre if not bad writing. " Political correct " cartoon characters and dialogue that seems to come straight from " Writing by Numbers " are quite annoying.

Not that I'm necessarily opposed to a bit of bad but strangely engaging fiction once in a while. I've read a fair number of Patterson's books, each time wondering why. As opposed to all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer books I read a couple of years ago when I was anxious and depressed. Literary valium. Highly recommended.