The Unquiet by John Connolly
8.
Title: The Unquiet
Author: John Connolly
Pages: 418
Year of Publication: 2007
Genre: Fiction -- literature
Grade: C+/B-
Finished on: 6 August 2007
Rebecca Clay hires P.I. Charlie Parker to protect her from a stalker who swears that her father, missing for five years and presumed dead, is still alive. I was not a fan of this book, as should be apparent from the grade. There were just too many points at which I thought the book was going to take a turn for the better and instead took a turn for the extremely odd. I’m down with supernatural stuff -- let's note which T.V. show is my favorite -- but Connolly did not do a good job of selling me on the presence of it in this book. There are some sections of truly lovely writing, but they seem incongruent with the rest of the book, and I really want to explain to Connolly that you can't use a particularly unique phrase more than once no matter how cool you think 'the honeycomb world' is. (I suspect he uses this phrase in all of his books.) I also really want to have a chat with him re: exposition and dialogue and how they should be different. I will say that the book improved significantly in the last fifty pages or so, once the whodunit aspect of things became a little clearer -- but the thing I love in mysteries is the moment when the reader gets to go, "Aha!" and Connolly denies the reader that moment. The narrator solves the mystery, but the reader doesn't have enough of the pieces to put together what's going on until Connolly straight up says, "Okay, this is what happened." I did not approve.