Saturday, July 05, 2008

The perils of dark alleys

There's a nice post about Jeff Somers' The Electric Church at Amateur Neurotica that includes this wonderful bit:

I can’t think of a single character I would call sympathetic. In fact, if I met any one of them in a dark alley I’d be surprised if I lived long enough to scream. But somehow they come together to create something I didn’t want to step away from. They were very much the underdogs, and who doesn’t like a good underdog?



5 comments:

Margaret Yang said...

It's really, really hard to write a compelling novel about unsympathetic characters. And yet, somehow, Somers pulls it off. (Waving fan girl pom pons.)

Julie Weathers said...

This is a striking comment and, although I won't be buying the book, it's intriguing.

Don't do scarey stuff. I'm delicate.

Kelley said...

Huh. That's funny. I just finished D.P. and I'd never say there weren't sympathetic characters in either. Doesn't mean I liked'em or they didn't scare the snot out of me, but at times, yes. Sympathetic. Certainly brilliant.

*shrugs*

a wonderful post though.

JES said...

Someone's blog -- was it PubRants? [...checking... yeah, it was] -- recently asked how we feel about blurbs. I don't know anything about the Amateur Neurotica blog, whether it's influential or not, but that's the kind of blurb I'd LOVE to have on a book of mine: one which shows that the reader actually read the book, had some reservations even after the fact, but came away impressed anyhow. I'd love readers like that.

Chris Eldin said...

What an awesome review!!!