{"id":810,"date":"2014-08-04T08:43:17","date_gmt":"2014-08-04T16:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=810"},"modified":"2014-08-04T08:43:17","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T16:43:17","slug":"unholy-night-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/04\/unholy-night-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"Unholy Night– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Unholy<\/a>Unholy Night<\/a> by Seth Grahame-Smith<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 2 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

Got this one from a friend who loaned me a whole stack of books. I\u2019ve been out of the reading rhythm for a while so I decided to start with this one since it seemed light-hearted and silly. It really wasn\u2019t. It was kind of tedious, but I chalked that up to my being a rusty reader. Having just finished it though, I\u2019m not so sure if it was me or just the novel.<\/p>\n

Ostensibly a re-telling of the baby-Jesus story and His flight to Egypt. But what do you expect from a re-telling: is it an homage, a parody, straight-up plagiarism? None of these in Unholy Night<\/em>, I\u2019m afraid. Just a loose framework used to tell a hack-n-slash adventure story.<\/p>\n

Which is fine, and don\u2019t get me wrong\u2014if there\u2019s cyberpunk and steampunk, why not history-punk? I\u2019m all for innovative genres. But everything Unholy Night<\/em> got from this \u201chistory\u201d was also the only<\/em> thing it had going for it. And that included a lot of deus ex machina.<\/p>\n

I mean, a lot. A story about one of the three wise-man using his sword and hatred to protect the Messiah as they try to escape Herod- and whenever it looks like they\u2019re trapped, voila, a miracle happens. Please. I feel as if a great opportunity for parody was utterly missed here. I get it\u2014this is The Living God wrapped in his arms, so \u201cdeus ex machina\u201d is almost obligatory. Maybe that\u2019s why it felt flat.<\/p>\n

Too many conveniences, too many coincidences, too much horror with too little consequence. I guess the best thing I can say about Unholy Night<\/em> is that, like the Bible itself, it ended up just being a bunch of words, words words.<\/p>\n

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

Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith My rating: 2 of 5 stars Got this one from a friend who loaned me a whole stack of books. I\u2019ve been out of the reading rhythm for a while so I decided to start with this one since it seemed light-hearted and silly. It really wasn\u2019t. It was kind … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Unholy Night– 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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-d4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810","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=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":811,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions\/811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}