Afterburn [Import] [Unbound]

Colin Harrison (Author)

Product Details

• Unbound
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (September 1997)
• ISBN-10: 0374700192
• ISBN-13: 978-0374700195
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What a horrible waste...., May 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Afterburn: A Novel (Hardcover)

Very few of the books that I buy do I not finish. This was one of them. Terribly formulaic in that dark 90's sort of way, off-putting in its bleakness without any kind of redeeming balance. Try Thomas Harris if you like that sort of tale; one winds up strangely admiring his Dr. Lecter. While Charlie in this novel is not the same kind of character, he winds up being disappointingly pathetic. A good review of this book prompted me to buy it sight unseen - an awful mistake. Truly a 0 star.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Scam, April 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Afterburn: A Novel (Hardcover)

Incredibly, one of my son's fifth grade friends brought me this book, which no doubt he snitched off the remainder rack of our local independent bookstore (where such stuff is practically given away anyway). Fortunately, he hadn't read it, but mistook it as something I would appreciate (perhaps the cover photo, to a 10 year old, spelled "deep" or "important"). Out of consideration for the the kid's feelings, I spent half an evening with the book, but wished I'd watched tv--or cleaned the gutters--or done anything else instead. This is a lifeless, joyless, altogether artless effort, clearly written with one (jaunticed) eye on a movie contract, the other on fast bucks for a paperback deal. The author, who another reader aptly points out is an editor at Harpers, must have called in his colleagues to promote this, getting it a whole lot more notice than it deserves, and the sort of blurbs usually reserved for serious fiction. I suppose that's the way things go in the publishing world today, but they shouldn't. It makes it difficult for readers to distinguish between serious fiction--or at least a good beach book--and a book so poorly written and edited that it should have never found a publisher. As a lawyer, I feel books of this nature should be published with a disclaimer...it's a scam.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrid.....hopefully an aberration, March 17, 2001

By 

Raymond K. Pezzi "Ray Pezzi" (Suttons Bay, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Afterburn: A Novel (Hardcover)

I read Harrison's earlier novels "Bodies Electric" and "Manhattan Nocturne" and enjoyed them very much, so I was really looking forward to this book. Unfortunately, "Afterburn" was a tremendous disappointment for me. The beautifully descriptive writing style evident in his earlier works is utterly lacking here. Perhaps it was just the shift from the first-person perspective in the earlier books to the third-person here, but the writing here is very plodding, prosaic, and workmanlike. Worse than that though, is the incredibly graphic and gratuitous sex and violence upon which Harrison dwells throughout "Afterburn". Hey, I like reading a nicely written erotic passage as much as anybody--I thought the 'sex scenes' in "Bodies Electric" were some of the hottest I'd ever read--but this book went way beyond eroticism. I'd suggest that, next time, Harrison might do better to leave a bit to the imagination and not provide us the equivalent of a gynecological exam. Violence? Well, after the 3rd or 4th multi-page torture scene, I started skimming rather than reading....as well as wondering if Harrison's apparent fascination with the intricacies of torture were an indication that he's a crazed sadist...or just a burned-out novelist trying to overcompensate for the loss of having something to say.