I saw quite a few entries on God is a Bullet, and that
prompted me to reserve the book from the library and read it.
It was a good read and overall entertaining. I had some minor
criticism of the book that detracted from my enjoyment. The
first complaint is the length of the book. Too many crime
books these days seem needlessly long and overdrawn. This is
genre fiction; I am not sure if the publishers push the
writers to make 180-page books into 240-page books and
210-page books into 300 or 400 plus page tomes. Are writers
now paid by the pound of output? They are Hardboiled, not
over cooked. Second, the book clearly is inspired by John
Ford's Film The Searchers, and more recently an eighties film
Hardcore. I had no read quarrel with that, I am just
wondering if things have gone full circle. Is it that common
for novelist today to draw on films? Not a major gripe.
Finally, the booked seemed dated and the dialogue forced. The
whole Manson type killer clan as portrayed by the author
seemed out of place and time. The dialogue in God is a Bullet
was at time just painful to read. If I had to hear case just
one time tell some fiend 'You're crossing over' I would have
cringed. Getting back to movies, this type of dialogue
reminded me of very bad movies in the 60s that tried to
portray Beat culture or the Hippie culture with similar
dialogue that attempts to be hip and trendy and sounds bad
the moment the character speaks. The talk about sheep, and
the other rants of the cult members and hangers-on is direct
contrast to the first conversations that Case had with Bob in
the beginning of the novel. The fist conversations were
honest and had depth the cult rants were nonsense patched
together by the numbers. Quite frankly it was embarrassing to
read this type of dialogue.
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