Books I Didn't Finish: The Gone World

My last post was about a book squandering a promising sci-fi concept on a dull detective story. Pivoting to something completely different, here’s another book that squanders a promising sci-fi concept on a dull detective story.

Using advanced space and time travel technology, a secretive program within the US government has made a disquieting discovery: the Terminus, a surreal apocalypse that’s travelling backwards through time, consuming more and more of our future until it eventually overtakes our present (the book’s present of 1997 that is, although I suppose it doesn’t matter since the Terminus will blessedly eradicate this hell year of 2022 on its way there).

The book opens with our protagonist Shannon Moss taking a space-time jaunt into the Terminus-afflicted future, and right off the bat it gives us some truly wild imagery: an endless forest of dead trees and black rivers, people crucified upside-down by blue fire, it’s arresting stuff.

And then it’s several years later and Shannon’s back on Earth solving a murder mystery for NCIS and zzzzzzz

It’s not that I have an inherent problem with murder mysteries—I consume a lot of them—but when the main character keeps taking breaks from police station conference rooms and dingy crime scenes to think about the time she travelled to another galaxy, it kind of makes me feel like I’d rather be reading about that stuff instead.

The combination of period piece detective fiction and spacefaring SF is a blend that could maybe work, but here there are a multitude of issues that crop up even besides the fact that the SF is way more interesting than the detective stuff. For one, the spacebound material doesn’t sit easily next to the cop material, either tonally or plot-wise; the conceit that the US government is using advanced technology sent from three hundred years in the future is fine, but when that technology includes a secret base on the far side of the moon and fleets of interstellar spaceships, it’s a little hard to take seriously.

Maybe this would be less of a problem if the detective part was particularly strong, which it isn’t. It comes off like the author was mainlining the first season of True Detective at the time of writing and really wanted to replicate that swampy, spooky atmosphere, but it’s way overdone here. Every murder is super fucked up and gory, there’s a location early on that has antler sculptures and a mosaic made of fur and taxidermied dead bodies and also creepy mirrors and probably a few other features I’m forgetting.

This sort of thing inherently lands better in a visual medium unless the prose descriptions are extremely vivid and well-observed—which they aren’t here—but apart from that, it’s all a little over the top. Like, I know you want those swampy True Detective vibes, but True Detective didn’t get into the really weird stuff for quite a while.

The book’s writing style tends to de-mystify elements of the plot–both the surreal imagery of the Terminus and the somewhat less surreal murder clues–via over-exposition. Like, there’s a bit within the opening pages where Shannon’s superior tells her that oh yeah, we see the crucified people all the time out there, we’ve got a name for them, and here’s the other weird stuff we’ve seen in the Terminus, which I’m going to describe in as dry and bland a manner as possible.

Also, the book does that thing I hate where it keeps using disconnected sentence fragments for description. The sentences, like this. Me sitting at my desk, blogging. About the sentences. On my computer, the screen glowing. Even the Google Docs auto-correct recognizing that this isn’t proper grammar. Blue lines appearing under the words.

When did people decide this was a good way to write stuff? Does anyone actually like this?

Put all of these problems together, and I jumped ship on The Gone World pretty quickly. It seemed lot more promising than Recursion, but not enough to make me keep reading.