Customer Reviews

Afterburn

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Unbelievably good. The tale describes three main characters in late 90's NYC, all exceedingly likable and flawed, then places them in such excruciating situations that I had to put the book down several times, only to grab it back up greedily five minutes later. Every page is a knife-edge and large parts of this book are unequalled by any other author in this genre. This skilled author knows exactly what he's doing, and it's criminal that he is not as well-known as Andre Dubus III. Don't read another word about this thriller. Buy it and pass it on and be grateful we have Harrison.

I have read all of Colin Harrison's books, and had eagerly awaited this one. Although the pace is just as driving and the characters as interesting, the violence - expecially the scenes with the drill - seemed gratuitous to me. I know Harrison is drawn to the dark underbelly of society, but in the past any violence or kinky sex was tied to character development. Here Harrison seems intent on providing grisly scenes of torture simply for shock value. As another reader suggested, you would do well to read "Bodies Electric" and "Manhattan Nocturne" before this book.

In all my years of reading I have never encountered a book that made me feel as though I had been cheated out of a portion of my life. If there was a way to go back in time and not read this I would do it.

The story of bad things happening to miserable people leaves the reader feeling somehow infected by contact with the book.

Harrisson has great command of the minute details of life but misses the big questions,who cares and why should they?

If you can imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie without humor or plot resolution, it would be Afterburn.

There's nothing wrong with good schlocky escapist beach-book fiction. Ed McBain, Thomas Harris (exception Hannibal) and J. Wambaugh write good, solid stories with good, solid workmanlike prose. Harrison's problem is that he's trying to, uh, Say Something Important About Death and Family, and quite frankly, this novel, with its stretch-the-bounds-of-absurdity-plot, can't carry it. What's worse, Harrison overwrites. He's like a drunk blathering at a bar. The two-bit philosophizing is embarassing, the kind of stuff you hear in freshman dorms. Charlie Ravitch is the least convincing veteran I've ever encountered in any novel (not to mention real life -- I recently retired from the U.S.M.C), and the women aren't much more than sex machines. And I do mean machines -- Harrison writes about sex the way a Bolshevik writes about pistons: as though it's the height of all human aspirations, but the way Harrison depicts it, there's nothing remotely sexy or fun about it. The only other person who writes so awfully, and so unrealistically, about sex is Harold Robbins. The mafiosos are bad caricatures (especially in light of the Sopranos) and the torture scene is not gross, it's stupid and gratuitous. Maybe the editor, seeing there was really nothing by way of a story here, told Harrison to put in something so they could market it to the gore crowd. Anyway, this is the sort of book that'll have a shelf-life of about a month. Then it will disappear. Thank God. My son gave me this book for my birthday. I might cut him out of the will after this.

Colin Harrison is a talented writer. Bodies Electric and particularly Manhattan Nocturne are smart, sharp thrillers, spiky and resonant.

Much of Afterburn is well-written, yet somehow it is kind of a dreadful book. The much-discussed-in-this-space sex and violence weren't the problems for me -- I thought the sex scenes were fun and the violence genuinely harrowing -- hey, it's a thriller. In a better conceived story they would have helped, not hurt, the narrative.

But when you turn the final page, there's little else to remember: the "climax" basically consists of endless pages of description of a random number scheme, the book ends with a thud, and you realize there's been precious little story involved, even from the outset.

In some misguided quest for realism or spasm of self-indulgence, the author seems to have forgotten that he's writing a pulp thriller. How do we know this? He's got pulp characters, pulp situations, pulp dialogue. Pulp sex and violence. Good ones, at that. But he has no story to give them shape and resonance, just a long, long, set-up and then a depressingly random series of events that conspire against (almost) everyone. And every bit of it, from Vietnam to prison to Manhattan to the above-mentioned number scheme, eventually becomes alarmingly over-detailed. Many self-conscious Dickens references don't make for a Dickens novel.

Yes, you can abandon story in literary fiction, but in pulp, no matter how well-wrought, without it all you have left is, well, sex and violence.

And now we know the secret underlying the Harrison marriage! A love of torture scenes! An inexplicably grueling read. A case of sensibility train-wrecking genuine talent. It's all too bad.

I whole-heartedly agree with a previous reviewer who described the experience of reading this book as "time in my life which I can never have back." I wish I had read that review before buying this book. This is the first novel by Mr. Harrison I have had the opportunity to read, and will be the last.

The scenes of graphic torture spread throughout the book are visceral and intense, but at least seem to be relative to the story until the end. The way he concludes his narrative is disturbingly pointless and callus, but worst of all unbelieveable. He subjects the reader to some of the most disturbing imagery I can recall, and for no good reason.

Do yourself a favor and don't bother.