Dead Lines

Rating:
Summary: Don't Spend your money on it!
Review: This book had some interesting concepts but slogged along at an excrutiatingly slow pace. Peter Russell, a director of soft porn films, learns that his best friend Phil has died suddenly of a heart attack. To top it off his daughter is kidnapped and murdered.

Phil takes on periodic work from a wierd, rich, sickly, entrapaneur. On one job, he wants Peter to pay $10,000 to a woman if she can answer a question. The old man's assistant, Michelle seems to make overtures to Peter. What any of this has to do with the plot, I am not sure.

Peter meets a guy at the old man's mansion who is trying to sell the old man on a new type of cell phone. He gives one to Peter. It seems the more Peter uses it the more wierd things he starts to see. Like old men that come up to him and ask him questions and then do the same thing (kind of like a movie rewind) over, before vanishing. Apparently by using the cell-phone he is disturbing the dead. The book continues with Peter going to work at an old prison (where a lot of executions took place) so there are plenty of dead people to disturb.

The plot is pretty strange and disjointed like it was written by someone on drugs. I realize Bear was trying to show how a new technology could be dangerous and tried to force the technology into a ghost story but it just doesn't work.

Read Hell House by Richard Matheson if you want a good ghost tale with a hint of technology.

I had a real difficult time finishing the rest of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Really freaking weird....
Review: This is the first time that I have read a book that has been penned by this author...and man is this guy touched!!! There were times that I had a hard time getting through this small novel...most, if not all of the concepts in this book were unbelievable...it was not scary at all...just very weird!!! Would I read another book by this same author.....probably NOT!!!! Book was very un-BEARABLE!!!! Sorry for the pun...had to do it!!!

Rating:
Summary: pretty good ghost story
Review: This was my first Greg Bear novel, so I don't come at it comparing it with his previous books. On its own terms, not in comparison with anything else, I thought it was a pretty good ghost story. These days (because life's too short to spend with a book you aren't enjoying) I only finish about half the books I start. And I did finish this one. I was curious about who was living without a soul (this was Russell's rich employer's question, which he wouldn't explain further -- "Is it possible for someone to live without a soul?") and the answer was indeed the soul of the climax.

Where it falls down, and where most novels fall down with me, is in whether I can care what happens to the protagonist and whether there's some really powerful suspense. I didn't experience that because the people the protagonist really cares about are already dead. There's not much he can do for them -- his daughter, his best friend. The world itself is in peril from the dead, but that just doesn't make the same suspense as danger to the protagonist and his loved ones. So for me, it was a fairly distant emotional bond with the protagonist. The living people left in his world -- ex-wife, friend's ex-wife, employer, employer's wife, business associates, his remaining daughter -- are all kind of obnoxious/not likeable, or not very central to the story.