**spoiler alert** This last installment starts out real dark, and has several bad reviews on account of one of the chapters. It's really dark, and I c**spoiler alert** This last installment starts out real dark, and has several bad reviews on account of one of the chapters. It's really dark, and I can easily see where some people might not only be bothered by it, but depending on personal history could have a severe reaction to it. I listened to only enough of it to confirm nothing was going to stop what was coming, and then I skipped the rest of the chapter.
After this chapter, the rest of the book is more of what we got in the first book, One in the Gut. Ryan does express remorse and guilt for things he was forced to do at the beginning of Three in the Heart. The conclusion is fine, though I would have liked it to go on in the epilogue just a little more and expand on the aftermath more.
Below is the chapter summary, and after reading this you can skip it altogether and go straight to 5 and still have all the details you need for the rest of the plot.
It would also be understandable if you skipped the book completely.
***Spoiler***
Chapter 4 involves the main character engaging in acts of violence against children. It's their avatars, and he's not in control of his actions due to events of the story, but it does happen. He's inserted into a children's game by Deep Dive, as they intend him to take the game down from the inside. The first 10-ish minutes of the chapter are about him, planning, arranging, and justifying his attack for when they arrive, and the last 15-ish minutes of the chapter are a very grisly description of him carrying out this plan.
It was a very disturbing thing to listen to, and as I said I only listened to enough of the chapter to confirm nothing was going to stop him and then skipped the rest of it. I'm pretty tolerant of dark material, but I'm also a father and even I found this all to be too much. I didn't need the details of him attacking and killing kids.
In chapter 5, any remaining children have fled the game and he engages in a boss fight with a game admin, and some details of what's been going on in the outside world are revealed. There's some mental justification for what he just did that takes place in ch 5 but it's obvious that even at this point he is struggling with what happened in ch 4.
Hopefully my review helps you decide whether 9r not this book is good for you....more
**spoiler alert** I'm a fan of Peter Clines, and I've never been disappointed by one of his books until now.
Simply put, the biggest problem Dead Moon **spoiler alert** I'm a fan of Peter Clines, and I've never been disappointed by one of his books until now.
Simply put, the biggest problem Dead Moon has is that the science involved just doesn't work that way.
That's not what happens to things exposed to a vacuum. That's not how heat transfer works in a vacuum. That's not how the moon's geology is.
Even something as simple as measuring things is wrong; characters repeatedly ask if measurements given in kilograms is "Earth weight or moon weight?", but kilograms measures mass, not weight, and that doesn't change just by going to the moon. That's the whole point of using SI in space in the first place. And these are characters who underwent training for a job on the moon that involves moving mass, so it doesn't make sense for them to repeatedly make this mistake.
Maybe if each of these was one or two instances in the novel, I could overlook them and suspend disbelief. But all of these come up again and again.
It's one thing to play a little loose with science to insert something "incomprehensible by humans" and make that the canvas of the plot; that's essentially what the other two Threshold books were and I enjoyed them. It was even a point in "The Fold", where the scientists themselves working on the device didn't understand what they were doing and how it worked.
But science fiction with a bad grasp of basic science? That killed this novel for me. And I'm really disappointed because of how good Peter Clines's other novels are.
The actual plot - the entity, the fact that it could animate and control the dead, everything it was trying to do, the plans the characters made to combat it, the characters themselves - that was all fine. "The Fold" and "14" were all stronger in those areas, but this would have been decent if not for the science aspect....more
Loading...
