5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Emerson in Years, March 13, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Into the Inferno (Hardcover)
Earl Emerson is my favorite author. His newest endeavor is only his second stand-alone novel. The writing is crisp, funny and totally enthralling. The lead character is not your typical problem solver. He thinks of himself as a jerk (especially to women) and not very bright. It's actually quite refreshing. It's highly entertaining to read a novel wherein: the reader in captivated by the plot, entrigued by the characters, and can appreciate the fine points of the author's style. Emerson can have a character who was brought up in a religoius cult say that he thinks his parents concept of heaven sounds "boring as hell." This novel is never boring!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Emerson's best work yet!, March 7, 2003
This review is from: Into the Inferno (Hardcover)
I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Amazing how the man can write such a dark tale about a man facing an imminent, ugly, and irrevocable end (brain death), and still find so many ways to make me laugh. Swope, our "hero" if he can be called that, is one of those guys who in real life makes my eyes cross, he's so inept and cowardly in his personal relationships, and so sure that the trip wire in those relationships could never have been put there by him. Yet he's drawn so finely by Emerson that Swope's flaws are part of the attraction -- you just can't help liking the idiot! He's flesh and blood and so very human.
The plot -- you can read about that in the professional reviews. Suffice it to say, this is one fabulous page-turner. Swope is running against the clock, and the short chapters -- every single one contributing to moving the plot forward; no wasted words here! -- seem to add to the quick pacing.
As for Emerson's prose, it's always been very, very good, but in this book I think he has taken his work to a new level. In his hands Crude American Vernacular becomes Sheer Poetry, and I'd love to provide examples but I doubt if amazon.com will print those words. Just... the letters MF now have a whole different connotation than the common street profanity I've always heard!
This is a beautiful book, filled with both honesty and humor (I mean laugh-out-loud funny). More than a simple thriller, we get the inside scoop on a man's self-examination when facing the total devastation of his life. How Swope comes to grips with his own sins, and the sins of others, is as fascinating as the fires and aid calls that Emerson describes to perfection. And yeah, I might even have got a bit wet around the eyes at the end.
And I want Mel Gibson to play Swope in the movie...
And one last note: The best, I mean THE VERY BEST chapter titles yet!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Always Figured Emerson Would Dabble in Sci-Fi, May 1, 2005
This is a typical Earl Emerson mystery, which means it's a wowzer of a story, with plausible characterization, wry humor, good misdirection and nonstop action scenes--but this one goes even farther. Jim Swope, the firefighter hero, will become a vegetable unless he discovers an antidote for an unknown poison that he and several others handled during a highway fire, and that quest gives this novel the flavor of a near-future sci-fi medical thriller.
I love Emerson's chapter titles in his Mac Fontana and stand-alone firefighting novels, which often make references to sci-fi books or movies (like "Stephanie Gets Into Donovan's Brain" in this book), so I figure it was only a matter of time before my favorite fireman would cross the line and slip a sci-fi element into his plot! More! More!
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