Furnace

by Muriel Gray

I'll just come right out and say that this book was horrible. I bought it from the bargains section in the from the local bookstore and decided to bring this one along on my trip to Shanghai, China to kill some time in between traveling. What a bad choice of book that was and no wonder it was in the bargain bin. One might discount that as being the point, it's in the bargain bin after all. I have however found some gems from the bargain bin like Sheldon's and Katzenbach's, so I usually take a chance on some books. But again, this choice was badly warranted.

I will get into the book good and proper. The plot is simple. Josh Spiller, truck driver goes to some Utopian town in the middle of nowhere and 'accidentally' kills a baby. Actually the mother purposely pushed the baby in the pram onto the road and Josh squashed baby. After that, weird things happen to Josh. People start avoiding him, his phone calls to other people turn out to be just static, during a hot shower there is something moving in the mist behind him, etc etc, regular run-of-the-mill horror elements.

To be perfectly honest here, I only read half the book. It's about 400 pages, and I did 200 pages. And that was a very painful 200 to do. And I'll take a shot at guessing the rest of the story to be the following. Demon that requires some sort of human sacrifice every now and then somehow latched onto Josh because he killed the baby. Then in the end either he dies, consumed by the fires of hell, or he lives happily ever after. Well, one way or the other I don't really care. I hope he dies, I hope the demon murders everyone. That would at least be a refreshing twist to what is an absolutely ridiculous book. I will now dissect.

From the format of the book one can tell something is wrong. Each chapter is about 10 pages. The 200 pages I read, I was up to chapter 23. That tells me one thing in that it is amateurish, like an unfit runner that requires to stop every other minute of running. The writing structure is also horrible. At one point, Gray commits the cardinal sin of actually changing character perspectives in the middle of a section. 

One of the characters which is Korean is described to be pouring tea with movements that are 'Geisha-like'. Get your cultural references right! Geishas are Japanese, not freaking Korean, which just goes to sthe how cultural ignorance. At the very least, it is showing a lazy writer who does not do proper research.

I had the idea that reading some mediocre books would help me spot the mistakes in my own writing. Now I realize I can spot mistakes just fine if I analyze my own work critically. There is no need to subject myself to endure this gruesome experience of reading such a badly-written book.

In essence, this book is a wasted of paper. One of the worst books I have ever read. You do not know how many times I wanted to fling it against the wall, or into the Furnace as the title suggests so fittingly.