Title: Iron House
Author: John Hart
Progress: 77%
Platform: Kindle
Amazon Rating: four out of five
stars
Book 1 out of 107
Judging from the Amazon reviews, some folks didn’t care for the gore. You can read similar sentiments in the reviews of Blood Meridian, American Psycho just about anything by Steven King.
“Oh it’s just too much! I couldn’t take it! Mercy me!” say these readers.
To me, the gore sections were
exactly what Iron House needed. They read fast, focused me, brought out a
nervous fascination that Iron House was lacking. They me uncomfortable, tense
and demanded to be read.
Gore is a cheap trick in a way, but
an effective one. The words that will make 10% of reader turn away in horror
will have the other 90% turning the pages faster, taking in each little
sickening detail.
In the case of Iron House, gore
serves a few purposes.
First, it makes us hate one of the bad guys even more. This guy Jimmy so loves torture, by the time he’s done flaying, puncturing and plucking the right eye out of his rival, we are to not only kill him ourselves, but to torture him right back, to jam a screwdriver or two between his ribs and see how he likes it.
When he then turns his torture
skills onto our pregnant heroine, we are ready to do a little eye ball plucking
ourselves.
We now hate this guy and will keep reading
just to see him get his just reward. It’s an easy trick to complete as a
writer.
You know what’s hard as a write? To
create a liekable hero. It’s not as easy as saving the cat, as the famous
screenwriting book would have us believe. Heroes need charm, the right
character strengths and the perfect flaws to make him seem human and relatable.
What a pain in the ass heroes are.
You know what’s easy, and just as
important as a hero to love, creating a villain to hate.
Don’t believe me? Check out this
very short story I’m about to write and try not to get offended by the finger I’m
about to jam onto one of your emotional buttons.
---
The Bad Guy by The 107 Reader
Joe walks down the street, and sees a cat, an orange cat named Fluffy that escaped out of the back door of his owner, an old lady who had no one else to talk to but that big, friendly, orange cat with a white mane that framed his face like a lion.
Joe lures the cat with an open can of tuna, grabs him by the scruff of his neck, and…Ah hell, I can’t even write down the horrible things Joe does to that cat. So end of story. Just pretend Joe did something horrible to that poor cat.
---
You really hate Joe now don’t
you? And I didn’t even have the heart to have him harm that imaginary cat. It’s
an easy trick for a writer, having your villain do the most horrible thing you
can imagine, then make it more horrible, then make it almost unspeakable, going so
far that even the American Psycho guy would say, “Dude. Really. Enough already.”
This is not negative criticism, by
the way. Tools are tools and writers should use them if they work. In Iron
House, the gore scenes work and in fact make the book more compelling. It got
under my skin in a way I really wasn’t expecting because of those bloody scenes.
Mr. Hart seems to keep doing that to
me. He will bug me with some obvious, annoying, too convenient, too amateurish
bit of writing, and then do something to win me back.
 |
| She should not know where your killer lives or what your hero should do next. Do not have your hero ask her such questions unless it is the start of a long and passionate love affair, or short and passionate love affair. And even then, she shouldn't know stuff for no other reason than you need her to know it. |
Before the gore scenes, there was
yet another flabbergasting bit of Dues Ex Machina. I was about to forgive him
for the waitress who also doubled as the phonebook white pages. I was beginning
to think a waitress in a very small town just might know where most of its
residents live. It was possible.
Forgiveness was almost doled out, then
our hero, Michael walks into a gas station looking for yet another person and
obscure location. He chats with the gas station attendant and guess what. That attendant
is a compendium of local history and an expert on this particular location. He knows just where to find this person of Michael's interest. Oy.
Annoying. Mr. Hart is not good, maybe even lazy, at the mystery parts of this novel.
Every bit of knowledge Mikael
Blomkvist gains in the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, he earns. You really can
learn a lot from newspaper archives and computer searches and interviewing people
connected to the events in question. You know what Mikael doesn’t do? Walk into
a restaurant, order lunch, then ask the waitress where he should go next and
get an easy answer.
So what have we learned? Convenient
answers, when we want to see our hero work for his knowledge, are frustrating
and distracting. However, uncomfortably gory scenes that make us squirm before crying
out for vengeance are good.
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