Wulf's Book Reviews

Haven by Claire Kent My rating: 1 of 5 stars Let’s get this review started with the best aspect of this novella: It’s short! And that’s a mercy because it tries to put a romance story into a post-apocalyptic world - and neither of these ideas actually works. The entire story felt forced, probably due to the length of this novella: the story never had a chance to develop and I feel very strongly that romance and apocalypse don’t really fit well together. Especially not when the author, who “ has been writing romance novels since she was twelve years old ”, never progressed beyond that age writing-wise: Our heroine, Faith, shows her maturity by gratuitous use of the word “fuck”. All over the place. I don’t mind vulgarity, but if it’s just introduced for its real or perceived “shock value”, it quickly becomes annoying. Especially if, as is the case here, the writing is on an extremely “plain” level. Simple sentences, driving the mediocre story forward without any linguistic ...

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami My rating: 1 of 5 stars Wow, this was bad, really bad. It starts with the reason for this novel’s popularity: It consists of 98% pure violence porn: We get to witness how about 40 15-year-old classmates from junior high school brutally murder each other. Actually, they’re more like slaughtering each other and through my reception of the text, I had the very unpleasant feeling of watching a violence-obsessed author act out his most revolting fantasies. Takami almost gleefully presents his sadistical ideas with excessive and gratuitous violence. While I presume the novel is meant to be a commentary on societal pressures and the dehumanising effects of violence, I felt that the graphic descriptions of bloodshed and gore were used purely for shock value and did little to further the plot or develop the characters. Speaking of which: The next percent is the characters displaying the character depth of a paramecium, a single-celled organism… Taka...

Wool by Hugh Howey My rating: 3 of 5 stars I went into this knowing nothing but the title and was somewhat dismayed by the premise of a pocket of survivors of humanity on a destroyed, toxic, dystopian Earth. Nevertheless, the characters seemed interesting enough - Sheriff Holston, Mayor Jahns, Deputy Marnes… And then Howey goes GRRM and kills them all off and leaves us in an even worse situation: » The silo was rotten to the core; an evil man was acting Mayor; a puppet stood where a good sheriff had been; and all the good men and women were gone. « Enter Jules, a gifted technician - who’s sent off to face certain death next; or perhaps death is not so certain after all? The entire beginning was slow-paced and disillusioning: We get introduced to potentially interesting people who are promptly taken away. Most of their backstories are never told, many important facts omitted and only ever alluded to but never properly resolved. Sadly, the pacing is also very uneven: Init...

One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 1 of 5 stars In a post-apocalyptic time and space, mankind is practically extinct due to a time war. At the end of time a sole survivor - a former soldier - sits and gleefully murders any stragglers. In order to remain alone and to prevent another rise of humanity and, thus, another war, he also travels back in time and happily commits genocide or whatever it takes to eradicate the survivors’ communities as well. Yes, murder and genocide for good fun. And as if that wasn’t enough in itself: I didn’t find it funny in the least. When this novella wasn’t about (mass) murder, it was about the cheapest kind of trolling. One disgusted star out of five. Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam View all my reviews https://turing.mailstation.de/one-day-all-this-will-be-yours-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/?feed_id=1553&_unique_id=63c51478d7765