Fountain Society

Rating:
Summary: This book stinks. Just let me die
Review: If Fountain Society is about facing one's mortality andconsidering the prospect of living for an eternity then I know how thebook's central character Dr Peter Jance feels. This book is dreadful and took me a lifetime to read, and they were wasted years. Fountain Society is a poorly constructed hack job, although kudos should go to Wes Craven for getting the words orgasm and Wizard of Oz into the same sentence.(He gets the star for that) The main flaw of this book is that after a superb opening Craven goes on to give the reader the whole plot from the get-go, we know more than the heroine, so we spend our time reading about her trying to discover the mystery. WE KNOW IT! The clever twists? Big deal, Every plot point is signposted in advance, so who cares? The characters are one dimensional, from the mad scientist to the beautiful and intelligent model this is nothing we haven't read before in hundreds of Michael Crichton/Philip Kerr's books. The dialogue reads like it was lifted from a bad 50s B-movie. If you want an excellent thriller about cloning, its morality and repercussions then read SPARES by Michael Marshall Smith. It is truly excellent

Rating:
Summary: fast-paced crightonesque thriller
Review: Interesting story, good weekend read, savor the medical scenes, written like a film which shouldn't surprise anyone. Better than some of his films. It would be a treat if he could publish every couple of years..reads like crighton, costello, and the writer who wrote the "keep" his name escapes me..

Rating:
Summary: a surprisingly well-written novel
Review: My daughter brought me this book to read -- Her belief: Wes Craven = Stephen King. But to me Wes Craven = slasher movies. Wasn't I refreshingly surprised to find a well-written medical thriller that even involved a romantic twist! Mr. Craven had hidden his writing talents from people like me who don't like to see teenagers slashed! This was a terrific first novel.

Rating:
Summary: What a horrible waste of time.
Review: Okay, I know that I bought this book at Jewel and that I really didn't expect it to be a masterpiece. But, this must have been the biggest waste of $7.00 ever! I have never been so bored reading a book before. The plot is increadibly un-realisitc and lame. Dr. Peter Jance commits murder to keep himself alive then blames it on his psychotic ex-best friend's greed. He then falls in love with his wife's clone and wishes that everyone could just get along. I wrote better stories in 5th grade! This is a horrible, horrible book. I feel that Wes Craven is a very talented director but a terrible writer....

Rating:
Summary: What a horrible waste of time.
Review: Okay, I know that I bought this book at Jewel and that I really didn't expect it to be a masterpiece. But, this must have been the biggest waste of $7.00 ever! I have never been so bored reading a book before. The plot is increadibly un-realisitc and lame. Dr. Peter Jance commits murder to keep himself alive then blames it on his psychotic ex-best friend's greed. He then falls in love with his wife's clone and wishes that everyone could just get along. I wrote better stories in 5th grade! This is a horrible, horrible book. I feel that Wes Craven is a very talented director but a terrible writer....

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good crightonesque thriller
Review: Okay..worth a read I 'd love to see Craven hone his skill and pound out a book every couple of years....Hey whats going on, this book has been out for a while and there's only 2 reviews? millions of people must log onto amazon, I con't believe that only 2 people have posted reviews..

Rating:
Summary: A sincere disappointment
Review: One would never think Wes Craven could be justifiably be accused of being pedantic. However, there is a feeling here that this story could have been ghost written by a student in Creative Writing 101 at Hooterville U.

Rating:
Summary: Good but something missing
Review: The story was good, but I felt that it skipped around a lot and it seem's that their was something missing. Maybe I'm just used to more intense story writing, like Dean Koontz, and John Saul. I feel this book would be better as a movie. Wes Craven is good at that. Fountain Society is worth reading. I guess for a first novel it's not that bad.

Rating:
Summary: Patchwork of greatness
Review: This "Fountain Society" is extremely entertaining. You just go on reading in the most compulsive way. You cannot stop. You cannot slow down. It is perfect. But, it is a patchwork of ideas, situations and themes that come from all around the horror scene, particularly Stephen King. We think, and have to think, of "Firestarter". But the characters are too simple, too at times skeletal. They lack depth. They are never in anyway ambiguous. They are always one-sided. If they happen to have two sides, they just shift from one to the other. There is no interlacing, hence no dialectical contradiction in them. They are monsters up to a point X and then they become heroes, right through to their sacrifice. Ethically the book has a great subject, but it is absolutely naive and unrealistic to believe that two women and one man will be able to defeat the whole military system of the US, even with the help of a computer whizzkid, and Fidel Castro. King has always a better ending: evil always survives. So we must say the book is a pageturner, but we know from the very start what is going to happen in the next ten pages and some of the situations are so crazy that they are unbelievable. And they never make us believe in the unbelievable. A DC3 against an F15 is just as silly as an ant against an elephant, a speck of dust against the sun itself. It is a good entertainment but it is not credible. And, in the end, we are not enriched with any hope, nor any fear. We are just finished with the book that we can put down never to come back to it. A second reading would not reveal details that are not there. And there are too many allusions to books we know that we prefer reading those again because of their originality. No one will be better than Mary Shelley and her "Frankenstein". Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rating:
Summary: Kinda like a diesel engine...
Review: This book is the literary equivalent to a diesel engine: It may take a while to get going, but once it starts, it goes and goes and goes, taking you along for one of the wildest Craven rides of your life. "Fountain Society" is an excellent novel from an excellent filmmaker with an impressive resume ranging from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" to "Scream". Wes Craven, like John Carpenter and George Romero before him, has become synonymous with the horror film genre, helping to shape it into what it has become today. Without Wes Craven we wouldn't have Freddy; just try configuring that into your brain for a moment and you'd have a few Halloween pranks and inside jokes removed from your memory.

But Craven isn't just about horror; he's about intelligence and plot, taking you into areas of completely original thinking while doing his absolute best to make you believe that everything you are experiencing as his audience member is possible. In "Fountain Society," we get that in spades. Literally everything in this book reads to be eerily plausible. Mostly, I speak of an astonishingly detailed surgical procedure that is prophecized by its engineer to be the birth of immortality. Craven goes through every passage of the procedure and the steps leading up to it with such detail and realism that we are almost convinced that such a thing could be accomplished. Such is the gift of a wonderful storyteller.

There really isn't much I could explain about the plot of the book that wouldn't give something away except to say that it revolves around a weapons engineer (Dr. Peter Jance), his wife (Beatrice Jance), the Frankenstein like Dr. Frederick Wolfe, a supermodel (Elizabeth ?), and a rich stock broker (Hans Brinkman). There are way too many surprises in this book to count. As they unfold flawlessly with the passing of the pages, I was willing to forgive Craven for his slow beginning of the novel, which delivers a completely unexpected shock of an ending.

Craven's decision to make this a book and not a film is one to his credit. This story could not exist as a film. The surprises within the story depend on it living in text, not in celluloid. It simply couldn't be done, unless you wanted to sacrifice Craven's uncanny ability to remain three steps ahead of his audience until the middle of the story, when he sprints ahead and never lets you catch up until you turn that very last page, you sigh your traditional final sigh that says, "I'm done," and close the binders of the book with a feeling of appreciation for the incredible work of thrilling literature that Craven has delivered. Read it; love it; read it again; love it more.