Vellum: Hal Duncan
This is the first book I've given up on in years.
1. I think the author was trying to make it all "creepy" and "disjointed" by trying to tell somewhere around five storylines in different worlds at once. Or whatever. I don't know his mind. But all the choppy story line and section breaks--it wasn't unusual to have one section break per page--it only served to confuse me. There was no way to tell what came first and what they were doing now or when they existed. It's all muddled and frankly by that point I couldn't be bothered to flip back and see what was going on.
2. The random swearing. OK, fine, drop the f-bomb. It's your book. But when it's just interjected three, four, five times a page, for hundreds of pages running, I get annoyed. Because really, was it necessary?
3. What got me the most, though, was how pretentious the whole thing was. This is a quote, lifted from a website (citation below): "From the Great Beyond she heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond the goddess heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond Inanna heard it, coming from the Deep Within." When I first read this, I thought: "OK, this is a little different," because he'd started the book in more-or-less typical voice. (I mean, the whole book sounds like the voice that's often used in prologues, but I could deal with that). But as the repetition and utter pretentiousness went on, and on, and on, I gave up.
I wanted something good to read, because the critics had praised it as--oh, let me find it--"monstrously brilliant."
Um, no.
Quote lifted from: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/vellum.htm, retrieved March 17, 2010