Review: Atlanta Nights
Apr. 23rd, 2010 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charameiI'm about five years late to the party, but after several long, hard months I've finally finished Atlanta Nights by the SFWA Travis Tea.
It is, I'm happy to report, absolutely dire. It makes very little sense, the writing is atrocious and while Chapter Thirty-Four has a certain poetry to its randomly-generated hash, it by no means makes any kind of sense.
Everyone's having sex with everyone else. There's a bizarre stylistic change to noir every time Andrew Venice has a scene, Bruce Lucent's age and the severity of his injuries change drastically with every chapter, at one point a character wakes up, realises it was all a dream and the plot carries on regardless I don't even know who half the characters were... and yet, this is not as bad as The Eye of Argon.
Oh, no. There are occasional moments of brilliance in Atlanta Nights: terrible, awful brilliance, ruthlessly compromised as soon as it's realised, but brilliance nonetheless. It is a bad book, but you can tell that it's a bad book written by experts. The prose is frequently understandable and the characters are sometimes mildly consistent.
It is worse than Twilight, probably: though Twilight has worse themes. (Atlanta Nights has no theme, which works in its favour when compared with Meyer's Mormon propgaganda.) But there's a great chasm between Twilight and The Eye of Argon, and it is into that chasm that Atlanta Nights falls.
Atlanta Nights: A terrible book that certainly should never have been accepted for publication. But not as bad as The Eye of Argon. Not by a stretched columnar clastic rock deposition.
It is, I'm happy to report, absolutely dire. It makes very little sense, the writing is atrocious and while Chapter Thirty-Four has a certain poetry to its randomly-generated hash, it by no means makes any kind of sense.
Everyone's having sex with everyone else. There's a bizarre stylistic change to noir every time Andrew Venice has a scene, Bruce Lucent's age and the severity of his injuries change drastically with every chapter, at one point a character wakes up, realises it was all a dream and the plot carries on regardless I don't even know who half the characters were... and yet, this is not as bad as The Eye of Argon.
Oh, no. There are occasional moments of brilliance in Atlanta Nights: terrible, awful brilliance, ruthlessly compromised as soon as it's realised, but brilliance nonetheless. It is a bad book, but you can tell that it's a bad book written by experts. The prose is frequently understandable and the characters are sometimes mildly consistent.
It is worse than Twilight, probably: though Twilight has worse themes. (Atlanta Nights has no theme, which works in its favour when compared with Meyer's Mormon propgaganda.) But there's a great chasm between Twilight and The Eye of Argon, and it is into that chasm that Atlanta Nights falls.
Atlanta Nights: A terrible book that certainly should never have been accepted for publication. But not as bad as The Eye of Argon. Not by a stretched columnar clastic rock deposition.
