Same. I thought the first 250 pages were a great combination of Stephen King and Michael Crichton, then it takes a huge dive in quality when it jumps ahead in time.
If you just read The Passage’s first 250 pages and forget the rest of the trilogy exists it’s near perfect. NOS4A2 is my “how does everyone else love this” of horror. Bafflingly bad book for me.
A Discovery of Witches NOS4A2 Dresden has some important vampire roles but not from their perspective The Passage series is great, after the time jump I still felt the I need to know the answer so continued. Fevre Dreams is written by George R. R. Martin The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro
In a different world GRRM kept writing horror fiction like that and Skin Trade and I can't say that world would be better but I sure would have liked to have seen it.
GRRM does like to branch out his workings. From ASOIAF and Nightflyers and Fevre Dream. Now he's doing a game from FromSoftware. He has a lot on his plate and we get it, its not WoW but its content. I like content
Interesting that you didn't enjoy it. I haven't read it but own it and am a big fan of Joe Hill because of his comics work. Only ever read a short story collection of his outside of comics. Have you read The Fireman? I know that one seems to be great from what I hear. I know recently the books you've posted about were all ones I've read. Have you read Anthony Horowitz's new books?
A friend and I read it at the same time and we both struggled greatly to finish it. Halfway through it she was like “I just do not care” and I was like “oh thank God me either” but we both still finished it and our mutual hatred of it is now a recurring joke. Tbh I disliked nos4a2 so much I kinda decided to not give anything else a try by him.
I've only read his most recent murder mystery ones but they are all incredible. Magpie Murders The Word Is Murder The Sentence is Death I absolutely loved the execution of Magpie Murders, however the content can get a little meaty at times and it was very British so it kinda dragged, to me, a bit but the ending was absolutely brilliant. The Word Is Murder and The Sentence Is Death are both in a series revolving around a Detective and Anthony Horowitz himself being a character in his own book. Word is my personal favorite and the one I keep trying to convince my wife to read. If you like puzzles, there are alot of puzzle elements to all of these that are really well done.
Thanks for the recommendations, I’m going to hit up a used book store in the next few days and see if any are available!
I finished it. I’m so happy I did, because it’s a really profound read. Beautifully written too. For those too lazy to click on the link: it’s John Grave’s 1959 account of canoeing down a part of the Brazos in Texas. It’s however also about frontier life, local history and about how modern life is changing everything (without any bitterness).