The Pond

Rating:
Summary: To whom it may concern...
Review: I bought "The pond" by Simon Lawrence in a used-books store. I'm ashamed to say, I bought it because, in a moment of futility, I thought the cover was cool. When I got home, I searched the web about Simon Lawrence, and what I got was pretty thin. For starters, Simon Lawrence doesn't exist. It's a pseudonym used by another author, the almost famous R.Karl Largent. "The pond" is Lawrence's one and only book. Largent is more prolific. At Amazon.com, you'll find at least 10 of Largent's books. All of them claiming, obviously, to be "#1 BESTSELLERS!!" and "THE TECHNO-THRILLER AUTHOR THAT OUT-CLANCYS CLANCY!". Well, anyway, hard to believe. And once you open the first page and start reading, it gets harder still. Largent, as far as I discovered, teaches writing in an university. In fact, his most popular books are something like "How to write and sell your novel", "Getting published - how the pros do it" and so on. His fiction books, although advertised as bestsellers, are not that much popular, at least regarding Amazon.com reviewers. Most of them have no reviews at all, and when they do, it's two or three at the most. And they are not very kind. After reading "The pond" I understand why.

First of all, I don't understand the reason for using a pseudonym here. Largent/Lawrence's style is so underdeveloped that using a pseudonym is unnecessary.

The cover says: "The pond - a novel of ecologic madness and unthinkable terror". Let's analyse those. Ecologic madness. The premise of the book is based on a small town in Alabama (or Louisiana); this town has a fertilizer plant, a Town Council and a reclusive old man and his deformed son, in whose property there's a stinking, misterious pond. There you go. These two lines describing the plot are enough to make the reader understand what the whole book is about. Nothing new here. Nothing ecological, and surely no madness.

Unthinkable terror. No way. What we have here, mostly towards the end, is a bunch of gore-filled scenes of chopped limbs and heads. I think the terror lies in the premise of the book, in the developmnet of the characters and Lawrence's style. The plot is thin and unwelcome, to say the least. I could see what the ending would be like from a mile away. The author couldn't decide on a main character, in fact he wasn't able to create at least one character that the reader would relate to. Lawrence's style is so academic and by-the-book that sometimes I thought I was reading non-fiction. The final lines are meant to be smart, but instead are completely ridiculous and hanging with no support. In fact, the whole book reads like the script of a bad "C" terror movie.

To sum it up, bad literature. Well, I read it through the end, at least.

Grade 3.5/10