Customer Reviews

Aftershock

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I adore a good disaster book, and I understand that with these kinds of books there is a level of chaos, quick character development and jumpy storytelling. With this particular book, even with those things in mind it was so boring and I actually wanted all these people (of which there were way too many to keep track of) to fall into a hole and die. I should have just rented the Posieden adventure and had my fix.

According to scientists, a major earthquake is going to hit the east coast sometime before the year 2010; the probability, according to the late Dr. Robert Ketter, is "nearly 100%." And one of the largest ground faults in the East runs parallel to 125th Street in Manhattan. So what would happen if a major earthquake hit New York City?

Such is the subject of the meticulously-researched novel by broadcast journalist Chuck Scarborough, Aftershock. He posits an earthquake in NYC in 1994 (oops), and it's obvious from the writings about the earthquake and the structural damage it is likely to do to various buildings in New York that Scarborough spent a lot of time talking about this with Ketter. And had the earthquake and its aftereffects remained the stars of this novel, it really might have been, as Robert B. Parker blazons on the front, "surely the most compelling novel of natural disaster..." However, I get the feeling that, in the actual review, what followed that ellipsis was "...this week."

Scarborough is absolutely, completely, thoroughly, utterly incapable of any kind of characterization whatsoever. His cardboard cutouts meander around the playing field attempting to show emotion and failing miserably, even in the wake of a huge natural disaster. As well, there are more then enough plotlines and subplots here to carry a book easily three times this one's four-hundred-page length, but many of them are ended far too abruptly, are forgotten for hundreds of pages and then picked up again for a paragraph, and other similarly annoying things. Even the section separators don't work in any consistent way (for about a hundred pages, the double lines separate different stories in different parts of the city, but then they stop doing so and are thrown in at random, it seems). Worst of all is the writing style itself. A representative sample: "Brendan and Sam could see from the helicopter the Alwyn Court on fire." Uh huh. A sentence any more twisted would have debilitating arthritis.

Still, it managed to keep me reading, and I guess that's something. Poseidon Adventure, phone home.

Chuck Scarborough is apparently some kind of a journalist, I remember the jacket bio of this book saying. He evidently wasn't a print journalist, because I've seen seventh-grade homework assignments that were substantially better written than this dreck. One of the other reviewers points out an example of it; I have to add that that was *not* an isolated example.

I wish I could say that the bad writing was the thing that marred an otherwise good story, with otherwise interesting characters, good plotlines, or whatever. Wish I could say that, because I spent several hours of my life reading this book, and those are hours I got *nothing* out of except a feeling of disgust when I realized that for some reason, somehow, some publisher thought enough of this drivel to commit it to hard cover. Not just paperback - *hard cover*.

Like a lot of disaster books, it uses multiple character viewpoint threads, people who start off with no relationship or connection to each other. OK, except that even these main characters are cardboard, and their actions/experiences are a succession of badly-engineered and terribly-paced cliches.

The plot. Well, there really isn't one, but one thing that did come across at the end was that Scarborough seemed to think he was creating dramatic tension with the question of Would New York City be rebuilt after the quake? The decision and the plan seem to be put in the hands of one guy, whose (*really* bad- I'm a local journalist and I've spent years covering urban planning) ideas get several pages of detailed description.

I respect fiction written by journalists because they do tend to see a bit, meet a lot of people, learn a little about everything. Seems there's a big difference between fiction written by print and TV journalists; Scarborough probably knows how to read his lines like a good little talking head, but he doesn't seem to have even a working knowledge of *anything* else, or even of basic human dynamics. He doesn't understand pacing, plotting, tension or the other basics of writing fiction, but that's to be expected... because neither does he seem to know much about how to *write*, period.

The only reason I can possibly see anybody reading this is if they're aspiring writers who've only just begun to try their hand at fiction. They can pick up Aftershock and know that yes, there's already someone out there who they're superior to.

A good read for those who enjoy reading disaster books. Good characters. Is going to be a TV movie this sunday.

Mr. Scarborough really outdoes himself with this one. His writing is so genuine and descriptive, I felt terrified for days afterward, waiting for the unexpected earthquake to happen...