Bookish philosophical thingydoober
My mom gets me a lot of Dean Koontz books, primarily because he's one of the few authors who's reliably available at Walmart, and because she knows that I'm not likely to have read everything he wrote yet. Plus she can remember his name. :P
So today I started reading his The Husband and came to a conclusion. I hate normal ppl in books as much as I hate them in reality. :P
The book is about this "normal guy" named Mitch who doesn't make all that much money (he's a gardener with his own 2 person business) and one day some guys kidnap his wife and tell him to give them $2 million for ransom. And I find his friend and coworker, Iggy, more interesting than I find Mitch. Because Iggy's this weirdo surfer dude who tells stories about guys getting their noses bitten off by meth-crazed iguanas. Whereas all Mitch does is worry and babble incoherently.
I haven't got far enough into the story yet to know whether this is an accurate representation of the rest of the book, but if it is, I think I'd rather see what Iggy would do if he had a wife to get kidnapped. Because he seems to have more personality than the main character at this point.
I don't want my heroes to be "normal guys", because I don't really think there's any such thing. Everybody has an Aunt Edna who brings over vats of pickled beets, or an Uncle Harry who exposes himself in public places, or a dog who humps everyone who visits, or a car that you have to open the door in order to get the windshield wipers to come on, or a story about the time they almost microwaved the cat. Those are the details that interest me. Not the "normal" stuff, the stuff that shows how weird life really is, and how weird most of us living through it are. I don't care if your character is a freakin accountant, he's gotta have something unique in his life to make him human. Because nondescript average Joes really aren't human.
So today I started reading his The Husband and came to a conclusion. I hate normal ppl in books as much as I hate them in reality. :P
The book is about this "normal guy" named Mitch who doesn't make all that much money (he's a gardener with his own 2 person business) and one day some guys kidnap his wife and tell him to give them $2 million for ransom. And I find his friend and coworker, Iggy, more interesting than I find Mitch. Because Iggy's this weirdo surfer dude who tells stories about guys getting their noses bitten off by meth-crazed iguanas. Whereas all Mitch does is worry and babble incoherently.
I haven't got far enough into the story yet to know whether this is an accurate representation of the rest of the book, but if it is, I think I'd rather see what Iggy would do if he had a wife to get kidnapped. Because he seems to have more personality than the main character at this point.
I don't want my heroes to be "normal guys", because I don't really think there's any such thing. Everybody has an Aunt Edna who brings over vats of pickled beets, or an Uncle Harry who exposes himself in public places, or a dog who humps everyone who visits, or a car that you have to open the door in order to get the windshield wipers to come on, or a story about the time they almost microwaved the cat. Those are the details that interest me. Not the "normal" stuff, the stuff that shows how weird life really is, and how weird most of us living through it are. I don't care if your character is a freakin accountant, he's gotta have something unique in his life to make him human. Because nondescript average Joes really aren't human.