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The Warehouse (2000)

by Paxton Helling(Favorite Author)

3.47 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

review 1: The book begins with a chilling scene in which Governor Hugh Clayton's home is invaded by four hooded men who bind and beat him, then rape his wife repeatedly while he lies helpless. All of this is done in complete silence. Clayton finds later that his wife has not survived the attack, which has occurred on their 25th anniversary.Gov. Clayton has enemies. He has reinstituted the death penalty in New York State, and, over the past couple of years, has presided over 224 executions by lethal injection. In his view, those who kill will kill again, and "capital punishment is not meant as a deterrent, rather it's a means to prevent the inevitable." But the Governor has other plans for dealing with criminality, specifically through a computer program called Intuition, written by ... morea man named Alex, himself a condemned man whose execution was actually a staged event, leaving him free to write the program undetected. The governor has begun this program in The Warehouse, where he believes criminals can be successfully rehabilitated. The computer code, instilled into the amygdala of the criminal brain, a process called Alternate Memory Consolidation, corrects the tendency toward criminal behavior.The program is almost ready for a public demonstration when things start to go awry. We learn that the governor's wife who was killed in the attack in the first chapter actually died by his own hand. There follow plenty of twists and turns, easily enough to satisfy any thriller fan.But, I had problems with the writing. Sorry if this sounds like Creative Writing 101, it's just the way I organize things:Typos and incorrect spellings: There were far too many of these. ntiny pecrnet for ninety percent, long for lone, vial for vile, soul for sole, pain for pane (of glass). After a bit I began to look for them, as in "Ouch, there's another one." The main problem they present is that of jerking the reader out of John Gardner's fictional dream.Unusual use of capitals in combination with lower case letters. These were scattered throughout the book, ex: Six-a.M, emPhaTic. In a few chapters, characters or events were introduced in caps. It was like reading from an outline. At first I thought this might be a post-modern innovation I hadn't seen before, but whatever, they were distracting.Lengthy dialogue: Sometimes a single speaker held forth for several pages without interruption. In Chapter 2, Ben, in an interview speaks for several pages in response to a question. Since most of today's interviews are of the sound bite variety where the subject barely gets in a few words before the interviewer interrupts with another question, it seems unlikely that Ben would get in such a long speech without interruption.POV shifts. In that same interview, POV shifted back and forth from Ben to the interviewer and back again.Lengthy sections of exposition. All too often the writer drifts away from the characters into distant third person or even omniscient narration, delivering long sections of exposition that could be presented in more intense and compelling fashion in actual scene. This also slows the pacing of the novelFinally, and this really does sounds like Creative Writing 101, the admonition Show, Don't Tell, should be observed wherever possible. The long expository sections are basically telling what should be shown. Let the reader figure it out!This book has an intriguing premise, plenty of action, twists and turns aplenty, but for this reader, the writing compromised the reading experience.
review 2: I loved the premise of this book. The plot was intriguing and there were enough twists in the story to keep it interesting. I probably would have given this story an extra star but the punctuation was a little annoying. Periods were placed at the end of words or phrases where there wasn't a sentence, or an emotion expressed. For example, the conjunction, "and", would appear as a single word, with a capital "a", followed be a period. It was rather distracting, since you always had to stop and re-read to make sure that you hadn't missed anything in the reading. I also noted a spelling mistake. The word "preceded" was spelled "pre-seeded". One misspelled word is minor though.Still, I enjoyed the book. There's a sequel coming and I would probably read it since, as I said, I really appreciated the premise behind the story. less

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