L.I.E. by David Hollander (CBR-III Review #25)

Cannonball Read III: Book #25/52
Published: 2000
Pages: 256 (11,135 total so far)
Genre: Coming-of-age

L.I.E. is kind of hard to describe because it barely has a plot. It loosely follows a guy named Harlan and his girlfriend (sometimes) Sarah through various periods of their young adult life in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It's a very disjointed story that cuts to a different storyline practically every paragraph and a different year every chapter.

I don't think I "got" this book. It started off really boring. In the middle, it sort of got interesting for a chapter or two when the story started flowing a little better (i.e. not jumping back and forth between EVERY paragraph). Then the last third or so what just a big pile of WTF.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

It starts getting kind of weird when Sarah borrows Harlan's car and gets run off the road by a black car with tinted windows. Up until this point, it was pretty much your run-of-the-mill teenage angst story. But then Sarah get away from the black car and it follows her to Harlan's workplace parking lot where the car tries to run her over. After escaping again, they open the car door to discover a crash test dummy was driving the rogue car. WHAT? Then a new chapter starts in some other year. Nothing else is said about it. If anyone can explain that to me, please do.

Also, the end is weird and makes no sense. Harlan and his new friend are driving the friend's little sister to school. They are trying to listen to a tape they made of their band and all of a sudden, the tape starts spewing out the book. Like an actual narration from the book you're currently reading - describing what they're doing and such. Of course this freaks them out. This is also never explained because the book just ENDS.

***END OF SPOILERS***

Why are we introducing new characters in the last chapter? WHAT ON EARTH IS THAT TAPE ABOUT?? This has got to be the most baffling book I have ever read.

Dogs by Nancy Kress (CBR-III #24)

Cannonball Read III: Book #24/52
Published: 2008
Pages: 320 (10,879 total so far)
Genre: Thriller

This book is about small town Tyler, Maryland and their sudden resurgence of dog attacks. Eventually, the entire town is quarantined due to a dog plague that is rapidly spreading. In the center of our story is former FBI agent, Tessa. Tessa just moved to Tyler from Washington, DC after her husband died in a car crash.

I'm not a dog person. So, a mass canine plague resulting in having to kill all the local dogs probably wouldn't really bother me as much as most people. I was also bitten by a dog once, so I sympathized more with the mauled humans than what's going to happen to the dogs.

The story starts out pretty strong. We have some decent characters and a town thrown into hysteria by some pretty brutal dog attacks. Then everything just kind of goes downhill. Kress throws in a bunch of unnecessary characters who all just sort of get jumbled up along with bunch of unnecessary subplots.

I wish they'd kept the focus more on Tessa and the two animal control guys, but they kind of get lost when they bring in all of the secondary characters (doctor who is studying the dog disease, random people in the hospital, etc.). Not to mention the totally random plots that come out of nowhere such as Tessa running off to Europe for about 30 pages.

I can imagine this getting made into a really tacky Scifi (or Syfy or whatever they're calling themselves now) Channel movie. It's not going to win any awards, but I can think of worse ways to spend a rainy afternoon.

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer (CBR-III #23)

Cannonball Read III: Book #23/52
Published: 2003
Pages: 432 (10,559 total so far)
Genre: Nonfiction/History

Most of my knowledge of the LDS or the FLDS came from the TV show Big Love or a handful of knowledge from reading about FLDS polygamous compound escapees. I knew nothing about their origins or how the FLDS separated from the Mormon church.

This book is a great read if you're at all interested in a history of the Mormon religion, as well as its fundamentalist offshoots. The book starts and ends with the story of the Lafferty brothers who brutally murdered their sister-in-law, Brenda and her 15-month-old daughter because "God told them to". It's a tragic story and shows how far religious fanatics can push their religion.

Sandwiched between the story of the Lafferty brothers, there is a fairly comprehensive history of the Mormon religion. They have an odd and violent history, but then again, most religious history tends to look odd to outsiders. However, the Mormon religion is a fairly new faith compared to other religions, so some of their origins are viewed under heavy scrutiny due to it being easier to fact-check certain things.

I picked up this book because I've read a couple books about women who have escaped the Fundamentalist LDS compounds and wanted a more thorough understanding of their core religion. Overall, this book gave a very interesting look into the religion, including what happens when people decide to take their beliefs too far.

Depraved by Bryan Smith (CBR-III #22)

Cannonball Read III: Book #22/52
Published: 2009
Pages: 336 (10,127 total so far)
Genre: Horror/Survival

Depraved is yet another entry into the backwoods-rednecks-who-kill-and-eat-people genre of horror. Basically, there's a whole town full of crazy rednecks of like to capture people passing through and torture them before they eat them.

I love a good horror story, but unfortunately this one was less than stellar. So for this review, I'm going to make a list of reasons why I didn't care for this book.

-The rape. Dear God THE RAPING. Seriously, I have never seen a book with so much rape in my life. There was male-on-male rape, female-on-female rape, male-on-female rape, female-on-male rape...you get the picture? And a lot of it was completely ridiculous - half the time, the victims are raping other prisoners that are trapped with them.

-There were way too many characters. The book kept cutting back and forth between like four sets of characters and it got really confusing. They're all pretty much being caught, raped and/or tortured, or running away from the crazy rednecks. So it was really hard to tell all the similar stories apart when you're constantly going being thrown in and out of different people's escape stories.

-There were also too many killing redneck families. Usually these types of stories have one crazy family, but this one had a whole community, so it was hard to keep track of all that as well.

-Apparently, this town has been kidnapping and murdering people for decades. So, how come all of a sudden EVERY SINGLE ONE of their captors escape at the same time without having anything to do with one another?

-I don't get the whole "supernatural" element they seemed to add randomly. There's this half demon/half man thing thrown in there for no apparent reason. It didn't add anything to the story at all.

-I hated the characters. I didn't care about a single one of them, probably because they were all just as bad as the "bad guys" who were kidnapping and torturing them. As soon as they escaped (or sometimes even before) they were all torturing/killing/raping people as well.

Depraved definitely lives up to it's title, but I'd suggest checking out Endurance by Jack Kilborn or Off Season by Jack Ketchum instead.