You're Next by Gregg Andrew HurwitzMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I won this book in a Crime Vault giveaway back in 2013. I was only able to read 5 of those books before finally admitting that my reading comprehension ability wasn't coming back after brain injury. Fast forward to 2018 and Lindamood-Bell restoring my reading comprehension. And after years of almost daily practice, building back up by reading familiar series or easy novels, I'm ready to tackle these books. I'm not going to reread the first 5; I'm beginning the next 5 with You're Next because, on my bookshelf, it's the one sitting next to the last book I'd read way back in 2013. Kind of strange it's exactly 10 years since I won these 10 books and read the first 5!
You're Next begins with a strange coincidence. Well, not exactly begins. The coincidence takes awhile to be made. Hurwitz writes good character descriptions. He weaves a plot from two angles well. And I liked the Then and Now sections of flashbacks that explained or gave context to current events.
For the first 40% or so of the novel I was hooked. The dialogue, the plot, the characters vibrated with life and uniqueness. A mystery tickled into being, piggybacking the opening one; the inner tension of the main character Mike filled the airspaces of the plot. And then it all began to descend into cliche.
I'm OK with phrase cliches, but a whole half of a novel being one big cliche?! Ugh. When I reached about 50% of the way through You're Next, I forgot all about what the title was hinting. Actually, thinking about it now, I didn't give the title a thought unlike with Leon's Brunetti series. The title itself, being a cliche, was a harbinger of this novel. I should've known! Without giving too much away, the premise -- the motivating force behind who's stalking Mike and what they want to do with him or to him -- could've gone in a much more interesting direction. I mean, Mike has a precocious kid Kat. That alone introduces possibilities.
I skimmed the last half only so I'd know what this plot was all about. By the time I learnt it, the premise had lost all its ability to engage me or my thoughts. The motivating force has a lot of thinking heft behind it, but the cliche smothered it all, the cliche of the good guys with guns and having to be violent because that's the only thing you can do with bad guys and then the good guy is capable of physical feats that beggar belief -- something I thought went out with the 20th century after readers/viewers began to know too much about injuries to be able to suspend disbelief.
Actually, thinking about it now, it's a little disrespectful towards the idea behind the novel the way Hurwitz smothered it in violence. Instead of it being central, it's a plot device. And by the time we get to it, there's little (any?) self-reflection like we saw in Mike at the start.
The beginning and ending are good bookends, but the setup to the ending is so unbelievable and so trite -- straight out of the 1970s violent action TV playbook and 1950s single-hero westerns and endless sexist TV series -- that it held no satisfaction for me.
One more thing: this sort of trite cliche masquerading as a good story is a big reason why the US is riddled with guns and North America with the idea you have to be violent to solve problems and feel better. A week before I read this novel, I heard Terry Crews talking about the day he'd gotten revenge on his father -- with violence just like Mike in this novel. He said that he felt horrible after. He didn't have any of the satisfaction he'd dreamed of having since he was a kid. Novels like this tell a lie about revenge. In real life, it doesn't satisfy, and the tension would be greater if novelists told the truth, had their character feel no satisfaction but instead horror. But I guess that wouldn't make for an easy ending. Much harder to write that kind of end.
I finished this book annoyed at how much of my precious energy it had sucked into its trite and cliched maw.
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