David Jacob Knight

I had such hopes for The Phone Company"The Phone Company" when I started reading it. The writing had a gritty immediacy that was unpleasant but compelling.

The story was centred around things that interest me: the online disinhibition effect and the dark side of social media which enables and even encourages us to be our worst selves.The mass voluntary sacrifice of privacy in order to be always on and always connected or just to get a better deal or a better ap.

With me, David Knight should have been preaching to the choir. I use a Samsung Smart Phone because I can easily take the battery out and kill the thing. I use duckduckgo as my default search engine and I have ghostery on both my browsers. Instead, he almost made me a fan of The Phone Company.

In the beginning I was pulled in by David Knight's world building. I liked that the Smart Phone was called a Tether (that's pretty much how I experience mine). I liked the evocation of life in a small town in Montana. I enjoyed the hinted at conspiracies and the smooth movement of the narrative backwards and forwards along the time line.

Sadly, after a while, it seemed that the book just lost its way.

The big bad Phone Company was TOO bad. It became pointlessly evil and ridiculously powerful, able to ignore the laws of physics. This changed it from a scary adversary into a force of nature with no personality and no agenda, just a huge potential for destruction.

The good guy, a local school teacher, widower, single parent and ludite was so boring and so weak, and so self-pitying that I wanted to help the Phone Company cut out his ineffectual but self-congratulatory liberal bleeding heart.

The good guy's best friend, a local Sheriff, started off interesting and then just faded to a plot device.

When we went on a pointless trip to Mount Rushmore just so I could be lectured on how terrible it was that this sacred place had been vandalised, I nearly added "The Phone Company" to my DNF pile.

I stuck with it because the writing was good and I foolishly believed that the story had to go somewhere eventually.

By the end of the book, the gritty edge had given way to nasty, but surprisingly coy, voyeurism mixed with a maudlin sentimental view of how much our hero loves his family.

I don't think I'll be reaching for any other David Jacob Knight books in the near future.… (mais)

2.5 Stars

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When will people ever learn it? If a deal seems like it's way too good to be true, that's usually what it is. Stay away from it. When Ben is asked to co-write a book with a famous author, he jumps at the opportunity immediately. Soon, he finds out that wasn't such a good idea.

This was a weird book, but not really in the good way. A lot was going on. The stalking/bullying together with a lot of mysterious (and unfortunately completely unexplained) things and more than a touch of fantasy and horror as well. It takes a wonderful conclusion to fit all these different elements together in the right way, but that's not what happened. The ending let the book down, as it didn't explain most of what happened and only left me with more questions. The last twist on the final page just left me with another sigh.

Ben is also a very annoying character. He felt like the character you love to hate, as he is portrayed as a jerk making fun of literally everyone who wants to help him, although I believe it was probably the intention you felt sorry for him, for all the bad things that are happening. He's not as freaked out as he should be considering what's happening to him and does he call the police at any point? Of course not, and all of that for perhaps 50.000 dollar. I admit, that's a lot of money, but way not enough for the things he's had to endure.

Besides this book broadcasts some of the worst German caricatures I've read in the last years. The whole company doesn't make any sense to me, but I won't disclose too much since I don't want to spoil it.

The writing was okay but the story far too long. Perhaps it was just me, but I didn't like the main character and I thought the story at times was just weird for the weirdness of it since it didn't get explained at the end at all.

I won a copy of The Pen Name in a BookLikes giveaway.… (mais)