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I'll say it again: Well. That was... something.

At the risk of alienating all of my most excellent friends who've loved this book, I'm going to be honest and say that while there were things that I liked about it... I didn't love it. I had quite a lot of issues with this book, so you know... let's get this ranting party started! :D

Secret Service agent Ethan Burke wakes up next to a river with no idea who he is or where he is or why he is wherever he is. Thus begins his quest to figure out what happened to him and how to get home to his wife and son. Along the way, he encounters mystery and resistance... almost like he's not meant to understand what's going on... Dun dun dunnnnnnn!

This didn't start on the greatest foot - with the very Koontzish (1) waking up with no memory thing and the M/C having a migraine as described by someone who's never actually experienced one, and the uber-nice Nurse Pam - but after a bit, it started to pick up. This is definitely a quick read, and the mysteriousness of everything was enough to keep me going. I liked Ethan, and I liked Beverly, and I was interested in finding out whether my theories about the story were right or not. And some were, and some were close, but not quite right, and some were wayyyyyyyyyy off-base.

But, now that I'm done with the book, and now that there's been an explanation of the ons that were going, I have to say that I liked a lot of individual pieces of this book, but as a whole it didn't work for me. This is one of those ideas books, where there are a shitton of great ideas, but none of them really mesh together with each other and instead feel like a mishmash of unfulfilled greatness. I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but don't worry, I shall elaborate and explain why I feel like that.

Consider this your electrified fence. Proceed past this point at your own spoiler risk.

First, the creepy "perfect" town thing has kind of been done to death. It's never as perfect as it seems, and there's always something hidden. To be honest, Nurse Pam should have been my first clue we were dealing with one of those places, but meeting her so early threw me off. Plus it did seem normal at first, and only got more and more abnormal as the story progressed. Kudos there for keeping me on my toes.

But then, when we find out what Wayward Pines is... it just doesn't make sense. I mean, this place is, at least according to Pilcher, the last vestiges of humanity, created when he discovered that humanity was changing due to environmental changes, and that the rest of the human population, in the span of 30 generations, would evolve, or devolve rather, to a more primitive form which would be more adapted to the hostile environment that we helped create with our factories and our CFCs and our nuclear meltdowns and our fossil fuel burning and our general stupid humanness. Oh, and we're also gonna be translucent, vicious carnivores with razor sharp talons and we'll run like wolves.

Now, I am no evolutionary biologist, but I really don't think it works like that. He's talking about macroevolution, and that takes a long damn time. Millions of years, not hundreds, or thousands.

So... I'm not buying it. And I'm especially not buying that the discovery of it was made early enough to have already sunk billions into R&D for suspended animation, and the mass production of the suspension tanks, as well as for the town to be fortified and stocked and ready for inhabitation by 1982, which is two years before planning even started for the Human Genome Project.

I mean, sure, maybe Pilcher was ahead of his time. But then I think that he has been kidnapping people and "integrating" them into his perfect little town for 50 years... and during this time he kept totally mum about the fate of the almost 7 billion OTHER people on the planet. Nothing said about letting anyone in government know what he'd discovered, or anyone in the scientific community (And I have to wonder... was his research peer reviewed?), or even his own family. He just started taking people, and his psychotic brain assured him that he was the savior of humanity in its "pure human" form. Nice. It doesn't seem like he really wanted to save people at all... it seems like he saw an opportunity for playing god, and took it, even if he's only god to a couple hundred people, and they don't really know that he's the one behind the curtain. Which makes me wonder... what happens when he dies? Who will man the watchtowers then?

So... coming back to the town. We now know that WP is that last refuge of humanity... only there's not that much humanity to be found there. Everyone lives a lie - no talking about the outside world, no talking about history, etc. But then, when someone strays from the rules, they are punished, severely. The entire town, children included, are rallied into a bloodthirsty mob and they beat the offender to death. Because that's how we're DIFFERENT from the creatures we became. Wait. What I mean to say is that we're still pretty and wear clothes and pretend like we are civilized (when we're not mob killing the nonconformist) so that makes us better than our see-thru evolutionary siblings who just act out of instinct and hunger.

The reasoning that Pilcher gives for this murderous mob culture is quite possibly the lamest I've ever seen. His response, that it's nothing new, and that if violence is the norm, people will adapt to it, while true, doesn't really explain WHY that has to be the norm. Oh, self-policing, Pilcher? Yeah, that's not self-policing. They aren't seeing someone do something against the rules and making a citizen's arrest to stop them from doing it. They are being woken in the middle of the night and being told who to hunt down and brutally kill. Leetle bit different.

I mean, at least kowtow to the idea that participating in murder with the rest of the town fosters a sense of community, of single-mindedness, of protecting the herd, or whatever. Or say that there's a smaller risk of a group rising up to challenge the enforcers if the whole town is involved in the enforcing.

But his reasoning is idiotic. I mean, according to him, he spent BILLIONS of dollars setting up this project, to save less than a thousand lives... and now whenever anyone breaks the rules, if they can't be mindmelded back into submission, he just has the townspeople kill them. Because hey, it's not like he did all this to save humanity or anything. *eye roll* I think it was more along the lines that Blake Crouch needed something to up the ante, and a murderous mob seemed like a good idea at the time.

A couple more things about the town before I move on. It's never explicitly mentioned, but it seems that it would be hard to sell the idea of this being a normal town, even one with bizarre rules regarding what can and can't be talked about, when people keep appearing and then disappearing, and then reappearing with no memories at all from the last time they were there. Pilcher mentions that it's Ethan's 3rd go at being introduced to the town. But... after the town encounters this guy, he disappears and then shows up again several years later, don't you think they'd wonder what the hell is going on?

And furthermore, how do you sell an entire town that almost every one of them just woke up next to the river with no memories of how they got there? You'd have to do it one or two at a time, and wouldn't THEY wonder about why there are no people there? Wouldn't they think it's odd that every couple days or weeks someone else just shows up fresh from their car crash coma? Wouldn't they think it odd that they are then told to just move on with their lives like they've lived there forever? I just don't see how this would work... They'd know that they were living in some crazy world that isn't quite right. They've only been out of stasis for 14 years - not long enough for the memories of past lives to have gone away... they just live in a constant state of fear that if they don't pretend to love Pleasantville, they'll be hunted down and killed as well. Some great life you built here, Pilcher.

So, those are my big issues with the book. Some of my other issues include, but are not limited to, the following:

First... The timeline. Ugh. This could have been better handled. It mostly bothered me toward the beginning of the book, and in hindsight, it makes sense how the amount of time someone would be in WP could be a little... wonky. But while reading this, it didn't work for me.

We start the book with Ethan waking up, and trying to figure things out. Then, we skip over to his wife, who is having a funeral ceremony for him, even though he's only missing. I immediately disliked her for this, because in my mind, Ethan's only been missing a day or two, and it seems like she's given up on him super quickly and that kinda makes her a heartless bitch. But then she reveals, midway through her deathday party, that it's really been 14 months since he's been gone.

Uhhh, why couldn't that have led the section? It seems to me that if it had, I would have been more sympathetic towards her, AND more worried about Ethan. But because of the way that the info was doled out, it didn't heighten the suspense or worry that I had for Ethan, because it was feasible that he might still find a way out of this weird creeper town.

Secondly, holy sentence fragments, Batman! (2)

"Just before the top, one of the holds broke loose and he nearly lost his balance.
Caught himself before he fell.
He could feel the wind streaming across the opening to the chute.
Glimpsed something catching sunlight straight above.
Froze.
Looked down.
He’d almost blown the chance to save himself.
With the monster fifteen feet away and two more trailing close behind it in the chute, Ethan reached down, the loose handhold that had nearly killed him just within reach.
He tore the chunk of rock from its housing, hoisted it over his head.
It was a handful, even bigger than he’d thought—two pounds of quartz-laced granite.
He wedged himself between the rock, took aim, and let it fly.
It struck the creature dead center of its face just as it was reaching for a new handhold.
Its grip failed.
It plunged down the chute.
Talons scraping rock.
Its velocity too great to self-arrest."

Also, you might have also noticed the tense flipping there. It plunged down the chute in past tense, but the talons were scraping rock in present tense. Lot of that going on as well.

Third, there were a lot of unconscious memories stirring around in Ethan's head, and every once in a while there'd be a real-world bit fighting its way in. These memories are always italicized, and the real-world bits should not have been. It might be a nitpick, but I think it makes it clearer and easier to follow that the voice-that-is-not-part-of-the-memory is coming from outside his head, and thus is separate from the memories.

So... Yeah. I wish I could say that I loved this one like everyone else. But I had far too many problems with it. It was a fun read, if one isn't bothered by the fragments or tense-blurring, and it went really quickly, so that was good, but overall, it just didn't really work for me.

1.Yeah, he's a bestselling author, but it's not a complimentary comparison from me.
2.That was my actual e-book note.