Review: Needs an editor and some focus, among other things
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 04 14, 2013
Several years ago, a video game named American McGee's Alice depicted a "twisted" version of Alice in Wonderland, one where everything was more sinister, more aggressive, and more alien than we associate with Lewis Carroll's classic work. What made Alice work, though, was the game's central conceit: that all of it was the result of Alice's psyche working through a devastating trauma - the death of her parents in a fire that she feel guilt for. Everything, from the Red Queen to the Jabberwocky, represented another aspect of that guilt and psychic damage, which made the game not just a collection of warped visions, but a cohesive whole. What does a decade-old video game have to do with Thursday Thistle? Simply this: without that cohesive narrative and central idea, Alice would have been a tedious collection of "edgy" interpretations for shock value...which is pretty much what Thursday Thistle was to me. A fusion of Alice in Wonderland and a fairy tale collection, Thursday Thistle is the story of a teenage girl who escapes into a world where, she theorizes, we see the original version of fairy tales, not the watered-down versions that fill our books. What those original versions are made up of pretty much jumps all over the place, but mostly, they're violent, nasty, and generally fairly sexual. None of which I have a problem with (Fahren's book Mad Mannequins from Hell was far more nasty and violent, and tossed in sex as needed, and I thoroughly enjoyed it), but here it feels less like it's all used to serve any kind of purpose and more just thrown in for its own sake. Yes, Fahren has a loose story that attempts to tie it all together, but that brings us to the next problem: this is a book that really, really needs a few more read-throughs. And I don't just mean for the story, though that would help - there are characters who wander in and out, confusing plot threads, and a general lack of clarity. No, what's more important is that the book is filled with missing punctuation, wrong word choices, and generally bad writing that left me sometimes reading and re-reading sentences just to parse what they were trying to say. And I'll be honest: I was already frustrated with the book from the story problems, but the grammatical issues kept pulling me out of the book and probably exacerbated my feelings about the poor flow of it all. I liked Fahren's horror novelMad Mannequins from Hellquite a bit, so Thursday Thistle was a pretty big letdown on so many levels. Here's hoping that this one's a fluke, or that he learns the lessons from this to improve his other work to come.