{"id":437,"date":"2012-06-18T08:33:02","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T16:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=437"},"modified":"2012-06-18T08:33:02","modified_gmt":"2012-06-18T16:33:02","slug":"malice-in-blunderland-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/18\/malice-in-blunderland-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"Malice In Blunderland&#8211; review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a style=\"float: left; padding-right: 20px;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/13144896-malice-in-blunderland\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/assets\/nocover\/111x148.png\" alt=\"Malice in Blunderland\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/13144896-malice-in-blunderland\">Malice in Blunderland<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/5362486.Jonny_Gibbings\">Jonny Gibbings<\/a><\/p>\n<p>My rating: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/350771504\">3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m guessing Johnny Gibbings read in a how-to-write book, or on a website someplace \u201ctry to abuse your main character as much as possible\u201d and then he thought to himself \u201coh, I can do that.\u201d And thus we have <em>Malice in Blunderland<\/em>, the story of a man riding the rails of unapologetic violence and humiliation. I\u2019m thinking this might even be a genre of fiction. The kind of novel that would be enjoyed by those who go online to watch videos of guys wrecking on their skateboards. Part Irvine Welsh (<em>Filth<\/em>, not <em>Trainspotting<\/em>) part JG Ballard (the wince-worthy parts of <em>Crash<\/em>), a picaresque without any of that bothersome metaphor and theme.<\/p>\n<p>Look, I\u2019m not trying to slag the guy off here. Lots of people are going to love this book. Yeah, there\u2019s clich\u00e9d characters, deux ex machina in spades, plot twists as predictable as anything you\u2019d see in one of those 80\u2019s mass-produced comedies\u2026 there\u2019s typos and I\u2019m even going to complain about how my particular e-reader didn\u2019t like the formatting of the .mobi file I received. But Johnny can write. I swear, I\u2019m not being facetious\u2014plot, character, setting, who gives a damn\u2014Gibbings&#8217; prose style is good enough for me, good enough that if he writes another book, I\u2019ll probably read it.<\/p>\n<p>I say probably because there really where parts of <em>Malice<\/em> that made me cringe. And I think it\u2019s fair that you, as a reader, should decide if that\u2019s a good thing or a bad thing. I read <em>American Psycho<\/em>, was glad I did, and swore I would never read it again. I saw <em>Natural Born Killers<\/em>, thought it was brilliant, and resolved I would never give it a second viewing. But I know there are people who reveled in the painful textures those pieces provided, and I think they\u2019d love <em>Malice in Blunderland<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/list\/377051-jason-edwards\">View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Malice in Blunderland by Jonny Gibbings My rating: 3 of 5 stars I\u2019m guessing Johnny Gibbings read in a how-to-write book, or on a website someplace \u201ctry to abuse your main character as much as possible\u201d and then he thought to himself \u201coh, I can do that.\u201d And thus we have Malice in Blunderland, the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/18\/malice-in-blunderland-review-on-goodreads\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Malice In Blunderland&#8211; review on Goodreads&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-73","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":438,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions\/438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}