And now we come to the end...

Title: Iron House

Author: John Hart

Progress: 100% Done!

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

Book 1 out of 107

Here we are, at the the end of Iron House, book one of 107.

Remember how in my last post I wondered if there would be one more epic, soap opera-esque twist?

There was! I'll say this one more time...SPOILER ALERT!

The final big revelation, taken right out of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, is that the crazy old hillbilly woman with the gamey leg and a filthy mouth is actually the mother of Michael (super assassin) and Julian (the weaker, more gentle, artistic, and crazy younger brother) AND, get this, Abigail (the adopted mother of Julian and almost adopted mother of Michael).


Let me try to put it more simply. The mother is actually the sister of the two brothers, one of whom was adopted by her when he was a child, making her his mother and sister. I said "more simply," not "simply," which might be impossible.


Abigail also turns out to be the murderer of all those people being pulled up from the bottom of the family lake. Well, not Abigail, but her evil alter ego, her hidden personality, Serena Slaughter, who was created when poor Abigail, as a ten year old, was forced to drown her first little brother in an icy lake because her mother didn't care for boys and seems to be evil to her very core.


These revelations come out in some big, entertaining scenes. You can almost hear the dramatic music in the background, heavy on the trombones and cellos...BUM-BUM-BUUUUUM... after each revelation.


Then Mr. Hart eases us into a pleasant coda full of the siblings walking on the beach, drinking wine, and getting to know each other.


He transitions nicely from there to five months later where Michael is in Spain, where he spends his days drinking coffee and waiting for his cell phone to ring, waiting for Elena (who hasn't been heard from since she flew away 10 chapters ago) to call ... and finally ... I won't give it it away, but it was nicely handled.


Now that I'm all done with Iron House, it strikes me how over-the-top happy the ending is. Michael gets $80 million or so. Abigail gets several million. Julian gets to go back to being a successful author.


The bad guys are all dead, but are the good guys so good they deserve all that treasure? 


Michael, in his lifetime, has killed dozens of people, and maybe they all deserved it, but does he get to decide that? Is he really so innocent?


Abigail might be crazy, but just because her other personality did all her killing, does that mean she can go free with no price to pay for all those bodies at the bottom of the lake?


In John Grisham books, the good guy never gets to keep the money. They sometimes come close, but in the end, they are glad to escape with their lives, their loved ones, and a few life lessons. The money they had been chasing evaporates because it wasn't earned honestly. That moral balancing in Grisham stories is a big part of his appeal, and a big part of the appeal of this genre.


Crime thrillers put their heroes in horrific situations filled with dangers and pains that most humans will never know. But we watch the news; we know bad things happen, that nightmares do come to life. We live in fear of those things happening to us. 


Stories can relieve that fear; they can take us to the dark place where it lives, give us a brief tour of the terrors that exist there and then show us a brightly lit exit, telling us that things will be okay, the good guys will eventually win, the case will be solved, and the bad will be punished. 


Mr. Grisham seems to also say that the good guys won't escape punishment either, if they don't play by the rules. Mr. Hart, he seems to be saying that if you kill the right kinds of people, or you don't seem to be aware that you have an evil alternative split personalty with a homicidal streak, you just might get that pot of gold. 


The ending of Iron House is indeed satisfying, even a little moving. But did it make me think at all? Did it get under my skin? Did it make me question my moral compass the way some of Mr. Grisham's novels have?


Nope. But that's okay. Maybe next time. I'm hoping to see Michael again in a future novel. 


Thanks to Mr. Hart for a good book. Looking forward to the next one.


And now, on to the next one...

Dangerous fish out of water and the kitchen sink might be next

Title: Iron House

Author: John Hart

Progress: 91%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

Book 1 out of 107

We are getting close to the end now, and Mr. Hart is bringing all his crazy characters and fraying plot threads together for one final romp.

But first, we have to deal with anther blinding flash of convenience, hopefully the last in the string of supporting characters who wander into the story, tell our hero Michael where to go next, and then disappear.

Iron House is driven by the classic conflict
of New York hitmen versus sexy hillbilly women.
Hey Micheal Chabon and Jon Frazen, top that for a theme!

This last convenient exposition incident (let's call these CEI's, as they happen so often) happened on top of hillbilly HQ, Slaughter Mountain. Mike is sifting through the wreckage of an old, burned-out mansion and pondering how he has reached another dead. Enter stage left: a minor character with a menial job and a lot of knowledge that Mike needs.

Maybe I wouldn’t have taken notice of these CEI characters if I hadn’t been reading with the goal of analyzing, of trying to figure out what makes this novel tick. Maybe I would fly right by these moments and get to the good parts, the violence, the stand offs, and the encounters with angry mountain people.

But wow, Mr. Hart does rely on this particular writer’s crutch a lot. Main character stuck? Don’t feel the need to have him earn the knowledge he needs to get to the next plot point? Just have him bump into someone who knows all the answers.

In between the contrivances, we get the good stuff that Mr. Hart is in a rush to show off. the scene where Michael, the New York hit man, confronts a crazy, old, mountain woman armed with a filthy mouth and a shotgun was terrific. I wasn’t expecting a fish-out-of-water twist in a book like this, and yet there it was and it totally worked. Great scene.

That scene sets up Michael’s final plan to bring down the good senator. He’s got all the pieces in place for a devastating trap, but wait! Another twist! Mike’s almost adopted mother turns out to be crazy, just like her actually adopted son, Julian. And it’s her other personality, her EVIL other self, that has been doing all the killing.

Let’s do a quick check list of all the thriller elements in Iron House…

Super assassin

Mafia

Corrupt politician

Rich people

Satanism (or maybe just witchcraft, unclear, we have yet to get back to the attic with the pentagram)

Psychopathic killer who wears overly fancy clothes

Creepy old orphanage
Hillbilly witches

Child abuse with an evil twist of creative cruelty

Government agents in black SUVs

Pregnant woman (who is also incredibly hot) in great peril

And now, yes, split personalities

Can we possibly get to the end of this book without one more soap opera moment? Will someone be hit in the head and develop amnesia? Will our hero reveal that he has terminal cancer on the last page? Is maybe someone a secret Russian spy? Maybe someone is actually an alien sent to our world to learn about humanity and became tragically addicted to copious amounts of drama.

So what did we learn today? It turns out that if you throw in every thriller trope you can fit within 350 pages or so, you too can get a 4 out of 5 star review on Amazon and a nice note from Next Gingrich. (Seriously, Newt tweeted about how much he liked this book.)

That would be one of just a very few things Newt and I kind of agree on. It’s a lot of fun. Ridiculous. But fun.

Second stories and false endings and velvet pants

Title: Iron HouseAuthor: John Hart
Progress: 81%
Platform: Kindle
Amazon Rating: four out of five stars
Book 1 out of 107

Here’s where we are…

Michael, our super assassin hero, has seemingly saved his love from a psychopath who is perverse enough to pluck out the eyeballs of his enemies and wear velvet pants in summer...at the same time.

I'm done serving the plot, so now now I get to leave again!
I'll be back at the end, when it's convenient
and our hero needs an emotional moment.

That should be the end, right? But it’s not. Now that he’s dispensed his “mafia trying to kill me and my pregnant girlfriend” problem, he now has to return his “must save my crazy little brother” problem.

Conveniently, his girlfriend, having served her purpose as damsel in distress, feels the need to head off to Spain, where her family lives. This will leave Michael to do dark deeds in the service of a higher purpose without constantly asking, "Are you okay? You want something to eat? Mind if I kill a guy before we go to lunch? It won't take long. Yes, we can have Chinese. I hate Chinese, but anything for you."

It turns out that much of this book is Michael driving to places with women. This seems to be Mr. Hart’s technique for getting in relationship-building dialogue as well as plenty of exposition. I suppose it works, but the weird part is that as soon as a destination is reached, Michael’s female companion suddenly feels the need to be somewhere else as soon as possible.

The older (yet beautiful) mom character drives with Michael out to the old orphanage. Within ten minutes of arriving, she flies back via helicopter like she's needed for an important congrssional vote. Dialogue occurred. Exposition was delivered. Mission accomplished. The character can now go home because hanging around would wreck the scenes Mr. Hart has in mind for Michael.

Mike’s girlfriend, freshly rescued, doesn’t want to hang out for very long, even though the safest place on the planet seems to be the seat next to her superman boyfriend. Nope, she wants to head off to Spain. He drives her to the airport. Dialogue.  Exposition. Off she goes.

Now Michael can finish up solving the mystery of who is murdering the guys who made his brother’s life miserable at the orphanage. The second story has now become the first story. The colorful, fun-to-hate bad guy has been replaced by a U.S. senator who has no morals and no concern for anything but his image. He doesn’t wear velvet pants, but we still know he’s a first class douche.

(By the way, that’s a good writer’s tip: If you want to quickly communicate douchiness, put a male character in velvet pants.)

The first clue to solving the mystery? Mike found it tucked in a drawer in the house where he killed he evil gangster who likes velvet pants. Very convenient. Too convenient. I guess we should be thankful Mike didn’t walk into a 7-11 and ask the Slurpee machine repairman if he had any incriminating evidence on a United States senator, to which the repairman would answer, “It just so happens…”

You know what’s weird? All these conveniences and contrivances are not bumming me out. I like this book. I’m looking forward to tomorrow morning when I can read some more and maybe finish it off.

How could that be? The characters. As simple as they are, as stereotypical, they continue to appeal with their big emotions and willingness to be committed to silly decisions. (The hot older mom heads off with Mike to meet the dangerous gangsters carrying a sack of cash AND a .38 she had no idea how to carry or use. Genius!)

What have we learned? Big dramatic characters that are simple, yet hugely drawn, can carry the day. But not as far an author might like. This book was a modest success, but didn’t exactly dominant the charts. Better, more detailed, more believable plotting, combined with this collection of characters, might have made for a bigger splash.
But what do I know? I’m a guy with 80 Twitter followers and 40 views of his blog. How does that math even work?

It's bloody violence time! Get your rain coats on!

Title: Iron House

Author: John Hart

Progress: 77%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

Book 1 out of 107

SPOILERS AHEAD! I am not kidding.

 Mr. Hart unleashed the gore. Eye balls are plucked. Skin is flayed. Chisels are inserted between ribs and the skin covering some poor guy’s ribs. Broken bones are twisted and gnashed into each other.

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.

Apologies, Then Snark, Then The Lesson

Title: Iron House

Author: John Hart

Progress: 62%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

I was just writing something critical and a little snarky about the last section I read in Iron House.

And then it occurred to me, John Hart might actually read this. I’m following Mr. Hart is on Twitter (@JohnHartAuthor) and when I post about his book, he just might read my snark. And this I felt bad about.

 A million years ago when I reviewed movies for an alternative news weekly, I never had such feelings. I laid waste to the bad and the mediocre with equal relish. Good reviews were much harder to write. Nice is boring. Praise is yawn inducing. Smart ass comments and insightful skewering get you laughs, admiring emails, and pats on the back from your editor.

That’s the way it has always worked. You make something for public consumption, you are fair game.

This is John Hart. He looks like a nice guy. But I've got to throw
some negetive feedback his way. Sorry, John!

This whole Twitter thing changes that equation. John seems like a nice guy. The acknowledgements at the front of his book are a good read just in themselves. His author photo makes him look friendly, like if you bumped into him at Starbuck’s he’d be happy to loan you a quarter if you need one to complete your latte purchase.

So let me talk to John for a minute…John, if you are reading this (and it would be kind of cool if you are because so far I think no one but me has read anything in this blog), I’m sorry for any snark I’m about to throw your way. Just know that I’m enjoying your book. Also, I paid for it, paid you (after Amazon gets their cut), so I get to have an opinion. Thanks for listening.

 Okay, back to today’s originally scheduled post…

 If you were watching a movie, say a murder mystery, and the hero drives into a small town where he doesn’t know a soul, and he can’t find a specific person, would you believe it if he sat down at a diner and asked the waitress and she knew exactly where this person was and when that person would be home?

Seriously? I have to think that that scene would get cut or re-written. If the hero’s problem is finding a reclusive person in a small town, it’s an interesting problem and an opportunity to show the smarts and resourcefulness of the hero. I expect my fictional Super Assassins to be able to find people by being internet geniuses, or being able to navigate the county clerk’s office or by charming an attractive loan officer at the bank who will gladly pull up a credit report on the mysterious person.

Instead, Michael, our hero and Super Assassin, walks into a diner, has lunch, asks a waitress where the target is and she knows not only where he lives but the fact that he’s there at night. Seriously. What? Come on!

After that things got much better. I liked the scene of Michael exploring the grounds of the old orphanage and experiencing the return of spontaneous memories. Returning to a childhood haunt is just like that, memories flying at your head like dodge balls at PE.

I also liked the scenes with Michael and the old man who after a shotgun blast appears to be a weak old fool, not the mean bastard that ran the place three decades ago. I wasn’t expecting the guy to be sympathetic, and yet there he was, flawed and weak and working on some small redemption. Nice.

What have I learned from today's section of Iron House? One overly convenient machination can almost spoil a lot of good writing. Be careful Mike!

Michael The Super Assassin, resident of Drama World

Title: Iron House

Author: John Hart

Progress: 54%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

I’m halfway into Iron House, the first book of my little 107 books project. Most of the readers on Amazon love it, and the critics seem happy with it as well.

So what makes this book tick? What am I learning from it?

First, I learned that reading big blocks of italics is annoying. The prologue is just a couple pages, but in italics.

Second, Hart’s prose often strikes me as pretentious, as if he’s trying a little too hard to sound writerly.

“His world was black and white, except for where it was red.”

That sentence bugged me to no end and I was 300 words into the book.

Wasn’t then the world black, white and red? And if the kid, who is running through a forest during winter, is seeing lots of black and white, why would he be seeing red? There is blood on his hands, sure, but implying that his world had a huge amount of red in it seemed a vast overstatement. I would rather just be told he had blood on his hands. A kid with blood on his hands is dramatic enough. I don’t need the poetic imagery exercise.

Also, it reminded me of that riddle that was hilarious in third grade… “And what’s black and white and red all over?”

Another taste of Hartian prose: “Frozen to the blade of a knife no child should own.”

What kind of knife should a child own? Is this a big knife? A pen knife? One of those jagged-edged affairs that Rambo might wield? I can think of a lot of knives children shouldn’t own.

So this novel and I got off to a rough start. Hart’s voice was grating on my reader’s ear. I suppose that happens a lot. You need to learn the rhythm of an author, get accustomed to how he uses the language. Sometimes it’s difficult.

I worked through it and eventually got into a reader’s flow, that golden state where time flies and you flow along effortlessly on the current of a well told story.

The story revolves around Michael, who is the kind of protagonist I will now dub “The Super Assassin™.”

Super Assassins are super heroes without costumes, and they show up a lot in books and movies. They are weapon’s experts, and can kill with everything from a paper clip to a bazooka to a ball of twine to a poison made from hummus, lemon juice and bubble gum. They are constantly referred to as “good” and as “talented.” They can beat up people, sneak around while almost invisible and are, for some reason, fantastic in bed.

Sometimes they have regrets about what they do, and the story is about redemption, about how the cold blooded killer discovers his moral compass, but too late in his life to do him any good other than cause his undoing. My favorite movie about one of those guys is Grosse Point Blank starring John Cusack. Rent it immediately if you have any interest in the assassin genre.

In other cases, the killers love what they do because they kill only for good reasons. James Bond is one of those. The Punisher from Marvel Comics is another.

The Super Assassins are great fictional characters because they are powerful, highly skilled, extremely rich, sexually irresistible and not bound in by any moral code but their own. In short, they are what every man wants to be.

Also, they are dangerous bad boys with five o’clock shadow and great taste in clothes and fabulously rich, which makes them what every woman wants.

So as fictional characters, they are fantastic. They appeal to pretty much everyone.

It’s too bad they don’t exist. They are too skilled, too bullet proof, too able to do the impossible over and over again.

They are also too rich. In the assassin mythology, they live in swanky homes, tastefully furnished, and have endless piles of cash to pull from. Killing people would seem to be big business.

In reality, there is not much market for real assassins. The guys who actually do it for a living are idiots and thugs, working as bag men and muscle for gangsters who are all but extinct.

Check this out…

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-iceman-confessions-of-a-mafia-hitman/

That guy is not sexy. He’s a goon. He’s scary. He didn’t get rich. He made a living and not much more. He is disgusting. He would be great bad guy, but not a hero in a best-selling novel. But he is an absolutely real assassin.

Michael is not. Michael is the unreal kind of super assassin. He is the product of a tough childhood in a brutal orphanage and also his powerful sense of justice mixed with a primal need to protect his younger, weaker, sickly and sensitive brother.

As a backstory, it’s deviously designed to make us sympathize with Michael, and to also have a reason to root for his brutality. When he kills, we are rooting for him to do it well. He kills only people who have it coming, always careful not to injure civilians. What a sweetheart.

The more I read Iron House, the more I know this character is designed specifically to manipulate me, to press all the dark emotion buttons…revenge, anger, bloodlust, righteousness…and yet I don’t care. I like Michael and I like how good he is at everything he does. I can’t wait for him to actually kill the bad guys, who are pretty awful and prove it over and over again, like when one of them pours gasoline over a pregnant woman and teases her by lighting a cigarette and dangling it over her. Nice. That guy needs shooting.

Around Michael, the Super Assassin, revolves a world as far from reality as he is. Everything is too big, too dramatic, too emotional and too convenient. Everyone is beautiful, often covered in some kind of grit or dirt, or sometimes their prettiness obscured by age, but no matter…the beauty shines through. Michael is beautiful. So is his brother. So is his the mother who adopted his brother. So is the mother’s husband. So is the crazy hillbilly witch who lives out in the woods. So is the dirt-covered hillbilly daughter of the witch who wears next to nothing and lives like a mountain panther. That is one extremely physically attractive group people trying to kill each other up in the Virginian mountains.

It’s unreal, exaggerated, contrived and filled with stereotypes. And yet, it’s entertaining. I can’t wait to see what happens next. In the last 10 pages Hart has added in a hint of Satanism, ritual sacrifice, and incest. This is Drama World, a world where nothing is like ours, where Super Assassins roam the land and witches covered in grime can seduce rich men on their way to becoming senators.

What’s not to like?

What have I learned from Iron House so far? If you are entertaining, you can be as contrived and unrealistic as you want.

And don’t write in italics for more than 20 words.