JOIN USTo cut to the chase: don’t waste your time on this book. I already wasted enough of mine.
Greig Beck is an Australian surfer, sunbather and computer engineer. Dark Rising appears to be a sci-fi thriller about an American mutant military superhero who is sent off to kill Iranians so that they can’t build a super weapon to destroy the world with. But Beck’s writing does not thrill or engage on any level. Not even when characters are killed do you feel anything, because none of them appear human in the first place. The novel doesn’t surprise, mystify, terrify, or shock. At no point does it suggest that the author knows the craft of suspense writing; and when that must be said of a sci-fi thriller, it means something has gone seriously wrong.
How so, you might question. Paper-thin characters, check. Alarming lack of prose-writing skills, check. Dull plotting, check. Boringly stiff and clichéd dialogue, check. There’s nothing remotely good about this novel.
Hold on, I hear you yelp: Can anything be that bad?
Yes, afraid so. Sample this: “Graham folded his arms and looked at his younger colleague with raised eyebrows. ‘Well, from this data I’d say he’s undergoing remyelination. It could be what’s turbo-charging his ability to think and make decisions. The treatment certainly wasn’t meant to do this, and I can’t believe it’s the result of significant penetration trauma.’
Marshal couldn’t help sounding excited as his mind worked through the implications of the physical changes. ‘Remyelination. Now that would be something — this guy walking around with a potential cure for MS and Alzheimer’s locked within him.’ ”
What you notice if you scrutinise the above dialogue is that the author has a penchant for mindless infodumps and no gift whatsoever for dramatic dialogue. Maybe he wishes to sound advanced, but to me, anybody who produces this kind of writing is in serious need of ‘remyelination’ treatment himself.
Not only do the two persons we are introduced to above sound nothing like top level US army doctors at a secret military research facility, about to release the most invincible superhuman soldier onto the battlefield, no, they don’t even sound human. Superior intelligence should be reflected in interesting dialogue, shouldn’t it?
So, is the story at least a little entertaining? Well, yes, if you’re the kind who’d enjoy watching a toddler play the same computer game on loud volume for eight hours at a stretch. Not that there’s anything wrong with toddlers or computer games, I’d actually prefer that combo to this moronic tedium of a novel.
I know what you are thinking: this is pulp and one shouldn’t expect it to measure up to anything that is worth reading. Wrong, wrong, wrong: even devoted pulp readers like myself need to be treated as intelligent humans.
Exhausted by the first 50 pages, I am tearing out my hair at the thought that the novel is almost 500 pages long. But I still plod on thinking, I’ll give the writer one more chance, only with the result that I am soon hoping that all these imploding super bombs based on black hole technology and other hi-tech weapons, were fired, at one go, at this book.
By the time the alien monsters make their first appearance (somewhere after 200 pages), I’m so bored that I don’t care if the monsters gobble up every character in the novel.
Enough newsprint wasted on this meaningless book. As a literary critic, it is my duty to end this review with an open letter to the author: Back to creative writing class, amateur level, with you Greig! Get your basic writing tool kit in order, or learn how to use the ‘delete’ button whenever you finish a new manuscript. Just because you have a degree in computer science doesn’t mean that you can write fiction too. If anybody who knows Greig reads this, if you happen to be his agent or publisher, please tell him to stop writing more novels.
So as not to close on a negative note, I’d urge everyone who’d like to read a hugely better thriller with much freakier monsters, to pick up a copy of Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon instead. It succeeds on every point where this book fails, and it takes its readers seriously.