I'm putting this under "adult thriller" even though there's very little thrilling going on. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, if House had been a female author, this book never would have been published. Editors would have focused more on the average -- and way too lengthy writing -- and not on any supposed "machismo" of writing about war. It's Mad Max: Fury Road from the point of view of the grunting Max -- there's a story here somewhere, but at about page 60 I started using the book as a doorstop (cheap paper, not very effective). The Kills is bloated, dull, wandering, and very, very distant from the characters the readers are being asked to spend a fair chunk of their reading lives with (1,000 pages -- clunk). If you want international intrigue go back to experts (and less wordy writers) like [a:Ward Just|150037|Ward Just|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1256001060p2/150037.jpg] and [a:Ward Just|150037|Ward Just|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1256001060p2/150037.jpg]. ( )

The Kills is a quartet of novels that is meant to transcend such limiting labels as a particular genre. And in some respects it achieves that lofty goal.

Take the first of the four parts, Sutler. It's definitely not a thriller. At one point the main character misses a bus. He then hangs around a bit, then catches the next bus. At another point he tries to do some online banking, but the webpage times out, so he doesn't bother. This is the kind of gritty realism that I could get from a high definition documentary about small stones. It's about as thrilling as making a sandwich. Less so, if the sandwich involves bacon.

The second part, The Massive definitely isn't a drama. It's a bit like that film Jarhead: a group of young men stationed in the middle of nowhere, Iraq, and finding that the only foe they have to combat is abject boredom. It's woefully tedious to get through, explains most of the ending at its beginning, and the reward for powering through it all? The explanation of an unresolved and forgotten plot point from the first part.

The penultimate part (the novel put me off reading so much that I had to think of part three as “the penultimate part” to trick myself into thinking I was nearly finished) is not a mystery. Much like the rest of the book, we're led to believe that nefarious machinations are going on behind the scenes, but our perspective is limited to characters who don't have the faintest idea what the hell is going on. Any real mystery the novel provokes is through the deliberate concealing of events, not through a deft touch.

The final part ties up all the loose ends. Hah! Not really. It's just another story vaguely linked through events and themes to the other three. It doesn't deign to wrap anything up, which I suppose is supposed to be artsy and clever because, like, you know, real life doesn't wrap things up. Oh no, wait, this is a story. The last two parts of the quartet aren't even bad stories, just kind of okay. But any hopes it had of clawing up to two stars went down the toilet on the final page when it's hinted that the first three parts might be the demented musings of part four's protagonist, trapped underground and letting her imagination run wild. Or at least that's how I read it, but by then I was just glad to be done with the whole thing.

Oh, and the afterword really shouldn't be an afterword. Having slogged through over a thousand pages of not-very-enjoyable fiction, I don't particularly want to find a little note informing me that The Kills is not just a book, it's a multimedia experience, and that I should go to these URLs when I reach these pages to enrich the experience. For one thing I read books to get away from computer screens and videos, and for another thing if I did want to stop reading to watch little video clips, it would have been really useful to know these links existed before I started reading the book. ( )

The Kills is a quartet of novels that is meant to transcend such limiting labels as a particular genre. And in some respects it achieves that lofty goal.

Take the first of the four parts, Sutler. It's definitely not a thriller. At one point the main character misses a bus. He then hangs around a bit, then catches the next bus. At another point he tries to do some online banking, but the webpage times out, so he doesn't bother. This is the kind of gritty realism that I could get from a high definition documentary about small stones. It's about as thrilling as making a sandwich. Less so, if the sandwich involves bacon.

The second part, The Massive definitely isn't a drama. It's a bit like that film Jarhead: a group of young men stationed in the middle of nowhere, Iraq, and finding that the only foe they have to combat is abject boredom. It's woefully tedious to get through, explains most of the ending at its beginning, and the reward for powering through it all? The explanation of an unresolved and forgotten plot point from the first part.

The penultimate part (the novel put me off reading so much that I had to think of part three as “the penultimate part” to trick myself into thinking I was nearly finished) is not a mystery. Much like the rest of the book, we're led to believe that nefarious machinations are going on behind the scenes, but our perspective is limited to characters who don't have the faintest idea what the hell is going on. Any real mystery the novel provokes is through the deliberate concealing of events, not through a deft touch.

The final part ties up all the loose ends. Hah! Not really. It's just another story vaguely linked through events and themes to the other three. It doesn't deign to wrap anything up, which I suppose is supposed to be artsy and clever because, like, you know, real life doesn't wrap things up. Oh no, wait, this is a story. The last two parts of the quartet aren't even bad stories, just kind of okay. But any hopes it had of clawing up to two stars went down the toilet on the final page when it's hinted that the first three parts might be the demented musings of part four's protagonist, trapped underground and letting her imagination run wild. Or at least that's how I read it, but by then I was just glad to be done with the whole thing.

Oh, and the afterword really shouldn't be an afterword. Having slogged through over a thousand pages of not-very-enjoyable fiction, I don't particularly want to find a little note informing me that The Kills is not just a book, it's a multimedia experience, and that I should go to these URLs when I reach these pages to enrich the experience. For one thing I read books to get away from computer screens and videos, and for another thing if I did want to stop reading to watch little video clips, it would have been really useful to know these links existed before I started reading the book. ( )

Though the subject matter is promising and the scope ambitious, The Kills never succeeds in being more than a sum of its parts. ( )

A case of gigantism. There is a lot of good, interesting and thought provoking stuff here, but the inescapable conclusion for me is that the writer was seduced by a brilliant and clever idea, and then just hasn't managed to communicate effectively what it is..