Author: Paul Cleave
Publisher: Atria
Publication Date: April 23, 2013
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Source: Edelweiss and NetGalley
Yay! Paul Cleave! I was so pleasantly surprised (okay, thrilled) to stumble upon Paul Cleave's previous novel, The Cleaner, so I was very excited about this one. And then...
I admit this book spent a long time on my ebook reader before I got around to finishing it. I was so excited to read more from Paul Cleave, so what happened?
I just couldn't get into this one. It didn't grab me from the very beginning like The Cleaner did. That in turn made me worry that either I was expecting too much by wanting this book to be just like the previous one, or else I had become a Paul Cleave fan too quickly and The Cleaner had just been a fluke.
As it turns out, I needn't have worried so much. Although it was published after The Cleaner, The Killing Hour was actually Paul Cleave's first book, written when he was only twenty-five, and I am far from the only reader who found it inferior. Cleave himself admits as much in the introduction, though he himself has an abiding love for the novel since it was his first. But just because I was underwhelmed by it doesn't mean I should give up on him altogether, so that's a relief.
Yay! Paul Cleave! I was so pleasantly surprised (okay, thrilled) to stumble upon Paul Cleave's previous novel, The Cleaner, so I was very excited about this one. And then...
I admit this book spent a long time on my ebook reader before I got around to finishing it. I was so excited to read more from Paul Cleave, so what happened?
I just couldn't get into this one. It didn't grab me from the very beginning like The Cleaner did. That in turn made me worry that either I was expecting too much by wanting this book to be just like the previous one, or else I had become a Paul Cleave fan too quickly and The Cleaner had just been a fluke.
As it turns out, I needn't have worried so much. Although it was published after The Cleaner, The Killing Hour was actually Paul Cleave's first book, written when he was only twenty-five, and I am far from the only reader who found it inferior. Cleave himself admits as much in the introduction, though he himself has an abiding love for the novel since it was his first. But just because I was underwhelmed by it doesn't mean I should give up on him altogether, so that's a relief.
The specific reason I didn't love this book--apart from inevitably comparing it to The Cleaner and finding it wanting--is because it seemed to lack a clear focus. It was written as a horror novel, rewritten as a crime novel, then rewritten again for international publication. All of those changes really show, and not always in a good way.
The result is a character who must both solve a real murder and grapple with ghosts, who uses language you'd expect in an early Stephen King novel--like "monsters," "the killing hours" and "The Real World"--but appears to be primarily motivated by a fear of the police. We're meant to question both his sanity and his level of involvement in the crimes at hand, then journey with him as he tries to sort the whole thing out, but I found myself not caring.
The stakes simply were not clear enough. Since the book opens with our main character covered in blood from murders that had already happened, we're not given the opportunity to care about the victims beforehand. So maybe our main character Charlie is also a victim? Except maybe he's not. And then he winds up kidnapping his estranged wife in an attempt to get her to help him solve the crime. It's so unclear who the "good guy" is (or bad guy for that matter) that I didn't know who to root for. Worse than that, I wasn't at all invested in solving the "mystery," such as it was.
I found myself skipping ahead and power-reading through much of it just so I could get to the end, find out what really happened and move on.
Luckily I have a whole stack of Paul Cleave novels to read and I suspect I will like many of them more than The Killing Hour.
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