{"id":473,"date":"2012-07-23T13:40:02","date_gmt":"2012-07-23T21:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=473"},"modified":"2012-07-23T13:40:02","modified_gmt":"2012-07-23T21:40:02","slug":"deadfall-hotel-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/23\/deadfall-hotel-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"Deadfall Hotel– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Deadfall<\/a>Deadfall Hotel<\/a> by Steve Rasnic Tem<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 1 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

Full disclosure: I have not finished Deadfall Hotel<\/em> yet, and the only reason I was even going to try and finish was for the sake of writing this review. I was struggling to read it last week, and skipped last Monday\u2019s review, and I fear the same will happen again today, unless I just get my thoughts down, finally. I don\u2019t expect there to be anything in the last 20 pages that will change my impressions much. Simply put: awful book.<\/p>\n

Now, that\u2019s just my opinion, of course, and you should read others\u2019 reviews, because some people liked the novel. They were intrigued by the setting, as was I, initially, intrigued by some of the characters. But Deadfall Hotel<\/em> is written too much to be like a dream, and I can\u2019t stand that kind of thing. I think dream sequences in books are a huge waste of time, the very worst aspect of deus ex machina<\/em> shoved down the reader\u2019s eyeballs. And this entire novel is meant to be a dream, a shifting, unexplained and unexplainable, entirely unsatisfying experience.<\/p>\n

Page after page are filled with inconsistencies, made-up-on-the-spot conveniences, last-minute explanations. And maybe such a thing is acceptable if all one wants is to get into mood or atmosphere, let plot and character development be damned. I just can’t stand blood and guts for blood and guts’ sake. If a book is going to be visceral, I need to know what the organs were doing in the first place. To call this book gratuitous is an understatement.<\/p>\n

Nothing provided is believable, and that this is \u201cfantasy\u201d is no excuse. Fantasy has to work even harder to achieve a kind of believability, and author Steve Rasnic Tem doesn\u2019t even bother. I only managed to get through the novel as far as I got by allowing myself to scan some of pages when nothing was happening except interpretation of impression of feeling. And even then I was stuck with nothing else to do and no other reading options.<\/p>\n

And all of that is too bad, because as I said, the idea was very intriguing: a widower and his daughter are asked to come run a large, rambling, mysterious resort with more than a few \u201cspecial\u201d guests. Comparisons to Stephen King\u2019s The Shining<\/em> are inevitable, but without merit, as the two books have nothing to do with one another other than being set in a remote hotel. Unless, like the Overlook, the Deadfall Hotel explodes at the end too; I don\u2019t know if I\u2019m going to bother reading that far to find out.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem My rating: 1 of 5 stars Full disclosure: I have not finished Deadfall Hotel yet, and the only reason I was even going to try and finish was for the sake of writing this review. I was struggling to read it last week, and skipped last Monday\u2019s review, and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Deadfall Hotel– review on Goodreads”<\/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-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-7D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","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=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}