CALIFORNIA GOTHIC

Rating:
Summary: Forced, contrived, and unsatisfying
Review: Finishing this novel was like waking up from a dream. When you dream, crazy things happen to you that seem sort of real yet really weird and illogical at the time, and it doesn't take long to forget the whole thing once you wake up. California Gothic features a disjointed narrative and a rather shaky plot. I really don't understand what Etchison's vision or intention was in writing this novel. Dan and Evie are happily married with one son, Eddie. Before Dan met Evie, his former girlfriend went gung ho over an anarchist resistance group and ended up dead at the hands of government agents. Out of the blue, Dan gets a message from his dead old flame announcing she is coming to take what is hers. Once she gets there, things get weird for everyone. Dan and Evie run around in circles, son Eddie and his fellow horror fan friend try to film their own horror film in the local salvage yard (with the mystery girl from Dan's past as the star), and each chapter seems to have its own separate reality. Some people end up dead, and then book finally winds down to a welcome yet lackluster ending. A lot of what these characters did made little sense to me, especially when two different versions of the same event started appearing in the murkier waters of the denouement. The writing itself does little to make up for the shaky plot. I found many of Etchison's descriptions to be rather contrived and wooden; in fact, he overdoes his descriptions to the point that they often become rather absurd.

Individual chapters did not really seem like different stories, but they also weren't connected to each other well enough to satisfy me. A lot of things struck me as quite goofy if not nonsensical in these pages, and the dialogues were too often forced and artificial. I never really connected with any character, so I never really cared what happened to any of them. This book won't bore you to tears or make you hurl it across the room, but it is far from compelling reading...

Rating:
Summary: Forced, contrived, and unsatisfying
Review: Finishing this novel was like waking up from a dream. When you dream, crazy things happen to you that seem sort of real yet really weird and illogical at the time, and it doesn't take long to forget the whole thing once you wake up. California Gothic features a disjointed narrative and a rather shaky plot. I really don't understand what Etchison's vision or intention was in writing this novel. Dan and Evie are happily married with one son, Eddie. Before Dan met Evie, his former girlfriend went gung ho over an anarchist resistance group and ended up dead at the hands of government agents. Out of the blue, Dan gets a message from his dead old flame announcing she is coming to take what is hers. Once she gets there, things get weird for everyone. Dan and Evie run around in circles, son Eddie and his fellow horror fan friend try to film their own horror film in the local salvage yard (with the mystery girl from Dan's past as the star), and each chapter seems to have its own separate reality. Some people end up dead, and then book finally winds down to a welcome yet lackluster ending. A lot of what these characters did made little sense to me, especially when two different versions of the same event started appearing in the murkier waters of the denouement. The writing itself does little to make up for the shaky plot. I found many of Etchison's descriptions to be rather contrived and wooden; in fact, he overdoes his descriptions to the point that they often become rather absurd.

Individual chapters did not really seem like different stories, but they also weren't connected to each other well enough to satisfy me. A lot of things struck me as quite goofy if not nonsensical in these pages, and the dialogues were too often forced and artificial. I never really connected with any character, so I never really cared what happened to any of them. This book won't bore you to tears or make you hurl it across the room, but it is far from compelling reading...

Rating:
Summary: 5 hours of my life that I'm not getting back
Review: I've recently started another book by edited Etchison and the name was hauntingly familiar-- all I could remember was that he wrote a lame book that was my misfortune to read many years ago. And this was it. Move on, move on, move on.

Rating:
Summary: 5 hours of my life that I'm not getting back
Review: I've recently started another book by edited Etchison and the name was hauntingly familiar-- all I could remember was that he wrote a lame book that was my misfortune to read many years ago. And this was it. Move on, move on, move on.

Rating:
Summary: It's Frankenbook!
Review: Is the main character haunted by the ghost of a former love, will the reader even care? This "novel" is nothing more than a few short stories stapled together to make a book length read. And the print and chapter gaps are pretty large too. Etchison is a great writer and this book is not without merit, but it feels like something that was tossed off, and the ending will make you feel cheated.

Rating:
Summary: Like most Etchison stuff . . .
Review: Well, not a very successful book. But really, in order to decide that, you'd have to know what the author's intent was, right? Here it just isn't clear. Now, that's not always a bad thing, but here, as is so in most "horror" tales, it is a bad thing. Everything about the story seemed rather arbitrary. It could've begun anywhere, could've gone anywhere, could've ended up anywhere. It just didn't matter. There was some good atmospheric stuff, but more often than not it was unnecessary, thrown in just to show how well the author could put you in the setting of the story. To make this review short, keep you horizons narrow and this will be a mind-blowing novel. Read more than three or four books in your life and this thing will either bore you or fall apart before your eyes. Hey, and here's something funny: I read this thing three times. Why? I think it was something in the drinking water here. I had forgotten reading it. Maybe it's just not good enough to remember but not bad enough to outrage the reader enough to always remember it and resent the author. In other words, it's like a lot of the horror being pedalled out there. Happy dumpster-diving.

Rating:
Summary: Like most Etchison stuff . . .
Review: Well, not a very successful book. But really, in order to decide that, you'd have to know what the author's intent was, right? Here it just isn't clear. Now, that's not always a bad thing, but here, as is so in most "horror" tales, it is a bad thing. Everything about the story seemed rather arbitrary. It could've begun anywhere, could've gone anywhere, could've ended up anywhere. It just didn't matter. There was some good atmospheric stuff, but more often than not it was unnecessary, thrown in just to show how well the author could put you in the setting of the story. To make this review short, keep you horizons narrow and this will be a mind-blowing novel. Read more than three or four books in your life and this thing will either bore you or fall apart before your eyes. Hey, and here's something funny: I read this thing three times. Why? I think it was something in the drinking water here. I had forgotten reading it. Maybe it's just not good enough to remember but not bad enough to outrage the reader enough to always remember it and resent the author. In other words, it's like a lot of the horror being pedalled out there. Happy dumpster-diving.