Alive in Necropolis Book

Worst book I've read this year, thus far. It is so terrible. It must have been its setting that made it this year's OneCity OneBook choice, because otherwise I can't imagine why anyone would be encouraged to read it. Yes, it got good reviews, and yes, it was a "runner-up for" the 2009 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award--these facts flabbergast me. Now I have to read this year's winner, at least to understand what goes on at the Hemingway Foundation.

This book is so terrible I will not be able to catalog all of its awfulness, but I hope to at least cover the most egregious offenses. Of course the most egregious offense is that it ever got written published, it is too late to correct that error.

Where to begin. Half the whole book, at least, is telling. Telling and telling and telling, providing so many unnecessary details that leave almost no room for the actual "mystery." I put that in quotes because, with one exception, none of the mysteries is solved, or explained in any way. IN ANY WAY. Why include so many details about a mystery if you are not going to provide even a single clue as to the solution?

To wit: We never learn: Why the ghosts remain Earth; why they do not want to eat the "Root" that makes them disappear (or to quote the novel, "die"); why the bad ghosts like to force the other ghosts to eat the Root; why Our Hero Mercer can see them; how it is possible for Our Corporeal Hero to physically harm ghosts; &c. &c. forever. I don't need a specific answer to every question, but the novel is written so that the mystery is completely inexplicable.

That is crux of this idiotic plot, then: It is built around a mystery that the reader cannot explicate.

It has further flaws, however. I counted at least five plots separate from the "main" story, all of which are technically connected in that they are all in this novel and different plots' characters at some points interact, but most of them have no business being in the novel at all. Why follow the junkie teens down to Mexico for two days? Why give Mrs. Featherstone a gambling problem? Why get so involved in the tragedy of Toronto and the acrobat, and his recovery through zazen? How does Fiona's post-cat-death freak out and subsequent car crash relate to Our Hero's Personal Growth Narrative, when it happens three chapters from the end of the book? Did the inclusion of Rev. Whipple contribute anything useful to Our Hero's Personal Growth Narrative? Did the friends need to find an old gravestone in Owen's yard and then mention it 20 times in four total pages? Why bother telling us anything about any of the ghosts' histories in the prologue, if they were never addressed, even obliquely, in the actual book?

OH AND: That "lead-lined safe" from whatever cult-style church in West Virginia? That's a big gun that never went off, Doug Dorst. Don't think I forgot about it.

The technical details are strange, too. He did lots of research with the Colma PD, and includes a quite a few pages styled as (difficult-to-read) official police reports. About medicine, though, it's like he just Wikipediaed "back surgery" or something and made the rest up from what he learned on TV. I mean, that silly scene at the end with Fiona and the huge guy, who hasn't reacted properly to "a sedative"? WTF "a sedative"? It's so lazy, and irksome, considering how descriptive he gets with so many things that do not need description.

I like stories set in places I know; admittedly, it's a nice ego-stroke to recognize the block or bar or statue that the author uses; you get to see a familiar place through strange eyes, and that's pretty all right too. Setting this novel from Colma to San Francisco unfortunately made it even worse. The man just can't name a street or a block or a neighborhood without adding a bunch of useless details--more goddamn TELLING--about it, so every location is like him yelling, "See! I know this place! I've been here I know it! I'm totally a local I lived here I know it I do!!" This becomes unbearable very quickly. It also makes it very clear that he used to live in the Haight, and that maybe he didn't take Muni so often because everyone is driving everywhere, even three blocks, which is just moronic.

Doug Dorst, I get it. I understand that you know San Francisco, or at least some of it; I understand that you find Colma fascinating; I get that you were trying to draw parallels: between Our Hero Mercer & his father and Sgt. Featherstone in his reports; between Our Hero & Jude and Jude and his father; between Mercer & his father and Jude & his father; and blah blah blah. You tried, Doug Dorst, but you did a VERY BAD JOB. Heroes episodes make more sense than your plot and Heroes, Doug Dorst, is particularly talented at introducing and then forgetting new characters; wasting episode after episode on dead-end storylines; for receiving a lot of praise that I'm not sure it ever deserved, because it was always unfocused, jumbled, aggravatingly repetitive. That is Alive in Necropolis. I am very, very sorry to have read it.