Customer Reviews

New Bedlam: A Novel

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

 

 

The book started out great, it was funny, interesting and appeared to be going in the right direction. It remained well written and full of steam until a little over halfway through. But by the end the book kind of fell on it's face. It wasn't that interesting, the characters lost thier zeal and the story just seemed rushed by the end. Like it had an alternate ending before it was editied out and the author has limited time to come up with another one. Or maybe he just ran out of ideas for the ending, who knows. It was a good read, it was funny and best of all it was different. However, the sizzle and flavor at the beginiing of the story, at least to me, was gone by the end. Would I read it again? Sure I would and I recommend it, you might feel differently about it.

This is my first Bill Flanagan novel. I enjoyed it. With it's interesting characters--Sammy Bignose and Moe Notty were particularly funny--and it's satiric look at the television industry, it was a welcome relief from my normal suspense novels.

New Bedlam is a great satirical novel about the TV business and a dysfunctional family. While the characters are a bit zany at times, they never turn into a complete parody. Because they maintain their humanity I actually could empathize with them. This is a nice change from other humorous works of fiction that go for the big laughs without maintaining the story. Here Flanagan not only writes a decent story but a compelling one that kept me reading for hours. If you like books by authors like Carl Hiaasen you will love New Bedlam. Its full of crazy characters but also carries a positive message.

Bobby Kahn, a hot, up and coming, television executive finds himself the fall guy for a scandal concerning his hit reality television show. Because news travels fast in the television executive floors, he needs to find a new job. Quick. Exhausting most of his contacts, he finds himself in the town of New Bedlam, Rhode Island, working for a small, family owned cable company, King Cable. Three stations but many customers. Those stations are quirky, which is an understatement. He has BoomerBox, a station that runs classic television series', Eureka, an arts station, and Comic Book Channel, which is self explanatory. His job is to build the stations, which will bring more cash into the already rich King family.

New Bedlam, by Bill Flanagan, is to television what Carl Hiaasen is to Florida. Razor sharp satire, using an insiders view of the industry, Flanagan weaves a very good story filled with quirky characters. Yet those characters never fall into stereotypical roles; they all seem to be grounded in reality. The path that Kahn takes to move the King Cable channels into better programming, while battling the King family members, is great fun. Flanagan uses his experience in the industry to provide believable programming choices for the channels, realistic conversations concerning television and the people that run it, and enough great scenes to keep the reader interested to the final page. If this is how family run cable companies were run, especially in the small town/rural markets, they should have turned the cameras on themselves. It would have made for riveting television.

Fantastic novel, it was another novel that I couldn't put down.