MIDDLEGAME remains one of my favorite books from the past ten years. SEASONAL FEARS is a faint echo that spins its wheels going nowhere fast. One of the central conceits of the book is that a main character literally cannot comprehend what another character is telling him, but instead of skipping over the conversations where the information is repeated to him, we as the audience just get to sit through 10+ repetitive conversations.

I really love the Apple TV+ show, I watched all four seasons in about 10 days. The story makes a better show than it does a book. This book is very much an airport vacation read, which is not my preferred style of writing.

This is really painful because I loved MEXICAN GOTHIC and THE DAUGHTER OF DOCTOR MOREAU. However, SILVER NITRATE does not have the lush writing style I loved about the other books. There are excessive descriptions of character actions, flat dialogue, and I don’t really care about the characters. It’s supposedly a horror story but I feel no tension building at all. This feels more like a rough draft of a screenplay than a completed novel.

The plot is meandering and the vulgar 10-year old schtick gets old real fast. I read some other reviews that say it picks up in the last 20%, but I’ve been “meaning to get back to” KITTENTITS for 5 months and I’m not excited about wading through another bad 50% to get to the good 20%.