Review: Poorly written, vaguely familiar concept
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 10, 2013
The centerpiece to this story winds up being Tyler, but that doesn't stop the author from cutting from scene-to-scene so much for the first half of the novella that you can hardly tell. It is a hackneyed Hollywood-Thriller technique---mass disaster strikes, focus on individual mini-stories and then try to bring everything together. This, however, is far too short and too abrupt to get away with that. The cut-away scenes of individual experiences are so brief sometimes that by the time you start reading you are finished and onto the next. Meanwhile, the centerpiece, supposedly Tyler, simply disappears and continuity goes with it. All sorts of strange things happen that are never really expounded upon. Abrupt, jagged and lagging the exposition to make it interesting, it often seems like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. It uses familiar techniques--but doesn't use them particularly well.