Sometimes you just gotta give 21%.

I understand why this would be well liked. It’s extremely palatable commercial fiction. It has two old, rough and tumble dudes attempting to make things “right” when their two gay sons are murdered for unknown reasons. They’re the ones for the job apparently, despite literally hating their sons, driving them to a life which did not include them.

It’s sort-of appealing? Parents finally giving a shit about the queer kids. But the problem for me was that they approach problems in a way that, yes, makes sense for the genre. Both hammers everything nails, and so on. But I truly did not believe the central conceit of them actually caring about their kids. And the only way I almost got there was the sense that it is very conditioned masculinity to provoke a reaction in men that they themselves were attacked by proxy because something they made or belonged to them was harmed.

But I still could not care less about them as people. And at that point it’s all just spinning wheels to me.

I did notice, however, a marked improvement in craft from Blacktop Wasteland, which deployed wildly incongruent similes and metaphors. It’s still very Hemingway-esque at a sentence level. And that’s a pejorative for me. I use it to mean repetitive and boring sentences, and therefore paragraphs. It’s a lot of commercial fiction these days. Usually can’t escape it. Sadly.

If the framing had been different for this story I do think I’d have kept up with it and enjoyed it. I like revenge stories that get the heart pumping. But homophobes trying to make things right between them and dead kids. That ain’t it, for me.