Irving Belateche, Alien Abduction (2016).
Good Reads meta-data is 437 pages rated 4.01 by 242 litizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: SoCal.
Tagline: Cyclopes.
Verdict: Less than meets the eye.
A creative take on the evergreen trope of alien abduction that I had first thought was to be played for laughs. Nope. Indeed that trope was buried in a soap opera family drama: husband loses his job, wife has cancer, truculent teenage children rebel, mortgage payments overdue, and so on, and on. Had they a dog, it would have turned rabid or something.
I didn’t turn the pages for that, but in a page count it is bulk of the book.
Oh, the A2 is there and it is well told and in a novel way. No spoiler on that except to say it confirms a nostrum of SyFyism, the aliens want our women!
There is a lot to like: Some insights into the changing world of journalism, basics of composition, DNA testing technicalities, characterisations, the to’ing and fro’ing in the urban agglomeration of Los Angeles, the way the writer avoided explanatory details, say about the curvature drive. Refreshing to read something by author who knows what a topic sentence is.
What I didn’t get is where the cash money came from in $100,000 units, how the drug was marketed, what happened to the boy Mason who so preoccupied Hero’s thoughts and then drops off the page. Did I blink?