Recently, I tried an experiment based on a simple question: Would my favorite authors as a teen/young adult stand the test of time? Would I still think these writers were any good? I was just curious. So at the library, I searched for books from one of my favorite horror books from back in the day and found that Christopher Pike writes adult fiction horror books, too. On top of that, his books were located only a few feet from the computer I was working on, so off I went. I came home with his 2007 book, Falling. On the cover is a review blurb that reads: “Literary crack cocaine.”
See, I thought that was a good sign at first, but after reading this book, I remembered that crack cocaine is actually not good for you.
Let’s be clear: This is not a good book. It has a vaguely interesting plot and you want to know what happens next, kinda. I think it’s more that once you get halfway into the book, you feel like you need to know how it ends, and you don’t want to cheat and flip to the back, because that’s just never right. Still, I almost quit this book about halfway in because I thought it would be too predictable and the writing was painful. It definitely wasn’t predictable, but the pain was real. I basically sped-read my way through the end and although there were lots of twists and turns, nothing was more important than reaching the end. I made myself finish, though, because I thought there might be a lesson in it for me.
The big idea: So this guy, Matt, falls in love with this girl, Amy, who is not very nice. She breaks his heart and he decides to fake his death and then return to torment her. This is happening at the same time an FBI agent, Kelly, goes rogue in pursuing a serial killer and ends up getting attacked with acid. Bummer, sure, but then her husband leaves her, takes their daughter, and moves in with another woman. Then Kelly takes on a case involving Amy and she ends up crossing paths with Matt.
The theme here is falling. Pike fairly beats you over the head with it. Everyone in this book is falling — out of planes, off boats, mountains, you name it. Mainly, everyone in this book has fallen in love and it has gone badly. There isn’t one normally functioning relationship in this book at all — not even a parent/child relationship. But that’s fine. It makes for high drama.
What’s the problem, then? We have to dedicate some time to some of the worst lines I’ve ever read. I mean, I physically recoiled at several passages in this book. Such as this one:
My god. OK, you want the reader to know Charlie is black. OK. There’s got to be a better way. You know, like this:
OK, not like this. And what exactly is even the meaning of this? Pete’s sake.
B-b-b-b-but wait, there’s more:
A … Lego. Maybe pick something that doesn’t have a completely different meaning for a parent of small kids. Is Amy really a pain in the foot? Lord.
We’re supposed to believe Kelly is smart, but then she says stupid stuff like this (she’s in disguise and I don’t want to waste time talking about why):
Asterisk: The Rolling Stones literally had a song called “Stoned,” and another one called “Stupid Girl.” But it’s the rap that makes you want to abuse your woman. This is so intellectually lazy that it’s distracting.
I feel that by now, you must surely get the point of the poor writing. Let’s move on to other aspects. In one way, Pike keeps the story going — he manages to cut through a lot of transitional stuff. But in other ways, this book is still bogged down in tedium and reflection. I was trying to get a grip on what was happening with this book, and then I realized what it was as I was reading something else entirely — instructions for something I had just purchased. The main problem here is that this book does a lot of telling, and not a lot of showing. We’ve got pages here of delving into Matt’s brain — how emotionally attached he is to Amy, the reasoning around why he does everything as opposed to Matt’s actions speaking for themselves. Which is admittedly hard is a situation like this, because for a smart person, Matt does a lot of very dumb things, and then stands around on the phone with whoever (as described by Pike) and thinks of how to get out of the dumb situation he just put himself into. Kelly, this alleged genius hotshot agent, literally does the same thing twice to get herself nearly killed WITH THE SAME PERSON and befriends a kidnapper who could just as easily kill her as well. If Kelly were real, this is the agent you want to investigate you for any serious crime. At the very least, she would give you a good head start. Basically, Pike tells us the wrong things. We have dialogue that goes on like this for three pages:
but he dedicates two paragraphs to the moment that Kelly realizes she can’t live without her family through a conversation with a random little girl.
So, besides the clunky writing, this book reinforced the necessity of the art of showing, not telling. Stephen King covers this in On Writing. There is one other book I’ve read like Falling: Wire in the Blood by Val McDermid. (This actually was made into a great British series with Robson Green who is just too damn sexy for his own good and he needs to stop it.) Anyway, both of these books had something good — a story. In McDermid’s case, she had strong characters and a good story. But the command of the language, the natural dialogue just wasn’t there. I think of other books I’ve read with the opposite issue — We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates is a good example — where the writing is sweeping and beautiful but when the book is over, you realize that it’s difficult to tell anyone what the story was about. For example, the defining moment of the book doesn’t happen in front of the reader’s eye. We just read about the fallout. No one jumped out of a plane in that book, and yet it still held my imagination better than one that involved several death-defying jumps, at least five instances where the main characters almost die, a surprise paternity result and just some wild stuff involving vinegar and the storage of dead bodies.
So what did I learn from my experiment, besides that you can have an interesting story and turn it into a bad book? Well, it leaves me a little afraid of looking at his most memorable book from my teen-dom now, Remember Me. Or of any of the other authors whose work I inhaled back then. Which of course means I’ll be doing this again.