Obscure Non-Spoiler Reviews “14″

What I love about this book:

It’s neo-Lovecraftian horror that somehow manages to feel very light, like an episode of friends that takes an unexpected hardcore turn into Cthulu-Ville. I also love its ensemble cast of characters who are all compelling in their own ways. Finally, and the biggest reason I love this book, I’m enchanted by the vocal talents of its narrator, Ray Porter, for the audiobook edition—yes, I’m one of those.

“14” does exactly what I want in modern-day cosmic horror. It keeps all the stakes of perception stretching nightmares, and it updates the characters to make them more relatable than just the stuffy professor type who stumbles upon a moldy old book. So, when bad things start happening to the characters, you genuinely care about their fates. Lovecraft, a pioneer of stories like this, didn’t always bother to name his characters, making it hard to care about them when things from beyond the veil of ordinary reality drove them insane. Oh no—that… guy—went nuts and jumped out of a window! I will forever remember fondly how frightened he was of fish people.

I credit Peter Clines for reawakening my enthusiasm for writing and great storytelling at a time when I had walked away from this art form. It is my favorite novel that I’ve read as an adult, it’s the first book I always recommend, and you should buy it.

What I don’t love about this book:

There isn’t much of anything I don’t like about “14,” which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect work of literature—I don’t believe perfection is possible. Subjectively, for me, all of its constituent elements of plot and character development work in a way I find pleasing. I often find myself picking a random moment in the story and relistening to the rest of the book from there—yes, sometimes that’s the very beginning—in an attempt to inhabit that headspace I experienced the first time I read the novel. Now I get that this is starting to sound like more reasons why I love this book, dear probably no other human being ever until aliens from Alpha Centauri are sifting through the wreckage of our collapsed society and only come across my blog to ascertain what our culture was like reader. But, where I’m going with this is with great familiarity inevitably, you can’t help but see little defects.

First off, as much as I love the dialog between characters, there are a few kitschy moments. The major one I’m thinking of is one character mentions Torchwood—which I’ve never seen, and I’m sure is a lovely program—but nobody in a group of people greater than three, who vary wildly in demographics, such as age group, asks, “what’s that again?” Everyone gets it, and the banter continues without missing a beat, which was probably a conscious decision by the author to keep the flow going, but I’d argue it feels a tad inauthentic.

This leads to my next point, every character, who are the protagonists—or orbit the protagonists in a friendly way, share essentially the same sense of humor, a light form of sarcastic gallows, which if you’ve read the preceding paragraphs, you’ll understand why it resonates with me. Groups of friends do tend to have similar senses of humor but are less likely, to have the exact same sense of humor, differences in experiences make that sort of thing unlikely. This means that how the characters talk doesn’t always sound exactly like how people actually talk. I would also argue that in fiction, we don’t really want characters to talk precisely how people actually speak in the real world, because real-world people do things like, um, you know add words and things improbably, and like, um, incorrectly, and repetitively, while sorta babbling on, stalling for time, because they sorta drift off, forgetting their original, you know, point they were driving at, at the beginning of their run-on sentence.

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