Deadline by Mira Grant

[lightreads]

Deadline by Mira Grant

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


DNF at 70%, though I went and spoiled myself when I realized just how little I care. And nope. Don't care.

It's interesting how polarizing Mira Grant/Seanan Mcguire is. The people who love her looooove her, and the people who don't are utterly baffled at all the fuss over such terribly written tripe. I've been on both sides of this: I have friends who speak in trembling, delighted voices of the Toby Day books, whereas I thought they were so poorly written as to irritate my brain like nails on a chalkboard. Then again, I genuinely enjoyed Feed, even though it had all the same leaden character work and thudding prose. So I wondered . . . which was the fluke?

Yeah. It was the book I liked. This one, without the political foreground designed to appeal to me, and without the emotional climax? *whistles between teeth*. All you've got left is writing that I find irritating to a really extraordinary degree. I mean, I read original M/M! I know from bad writing, and have excellent mental muscles for tuning it out! But there is just something to her writing that is unignorably bad, and reading it makes my brainstem hurt.

Maybe it's the endless, endless repetition of detail. I would put down solid money that, at some point, someone really impressed Grant with this idea that to build convincing characters, what you do is choose some distinguishing characteristic and emphasize it. So she was like, I know! I'll make these people drink Coke! That's character-building!

And I wander off with a terrible headache, muttering about how brand association isn't the same thing as characterization, and also oh my God please please stop with the Coke we know stop stop stop.

Or maybe it's how her world building is not done through variation and elaboration, but repetition. Characters in this book take repeated blood tests to assess zombie infection status. Every step of this process is described in such precise and identical detail, over and over and over again, that at one point I started reciting the paragraph along with my audiobook narrator, and I had most of the words right. That's not world building, kids. That's bad writing.

These are just guesses. Neither of those things alone could account for my near allergic reaction to her prose. It's just. Nails on a chalkboard. In my soul.

I dunno, maybe she'll happen to drop another book right on my buttons some day. She seems to publish something every ten minutes, so it's possible. I just don't see why I should bother irritating myself trying to find it.




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