Michael Tice

In the wee hours of the morning, after I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, I finished reading “The Shadow” by “James Patterson” and Brian Sitts. Mostly Brian Sitts, of course, since Patterson doesn't really write all these books, but I digress. I knew this book was bad going in. I started reading and this book was bad then. I got to the end, and holy shit is this book an absolute train wreck. Let's start with the obvious. The book is 400 pages long. It has 101 chapters. You can do the math there. There are multiple POV characters, fine. but ONE character gets a first person POV while everyone else is third person POV, except for one, albeit 4 page, chapter where the usual first person POV character becomes a third person POV character. Who thought this was a good idea? Do you remember what The Shadow's “powers” are? He had the hypnotic power to cloud men's minds, making him essentially invisible to them. He did not turn invisible. What does THIS Shadow do? First he literally turns invisible. Then he finds he can shape change into a cat. Then he starts shooting fireballs from his hands! And in the climactic 3 page final battle with Shiwan Khan chapter, he transforms into a... Wait for it... A BRICK WALL! The Shadow and his new protege figure out what Shiwan Khan is trying to do, and with a simple sentence is able to completely thwart the plan and have the entire city rise up in rebellion and take everything over in half a chapter! Or about 1.5 pages. 

Do I feel like I wasted my time reading this? Absolutely not. It was complete garbage where I am pretty sure the average sentence length is similar to the per chapter page count, but it was still fun in its stupid kind of way where you just feel angry about reading it but at the same time wondering what kind of moronic garbage is going to come out of the writer's pen next. Next up, I'm going to read the “James Patterson” and Brian Sitts first Doc Savage novel. I've heard it is worse.

Dull, stupid, nonsensical, misogynistic, fat phobic, homophobic. If I had seen the anime before I read the book it is based on I never would have read the book.

Fuck this stupid piece of trash.

Like all books that had a movie based off of them, I went into this thinking, “This must be looked at like its own separate entity.”

I can see how, in 1965, people would have seen this as an extremely shocking novel. The depictions of violence committed against mainly women are definitely horrific. However, other than a brief foray through another gang's territory where they decided to turn into a war band in a very ritualistic method, which I am assuming is reminiscent of a scene in The Anabasis, but since I have yet to read Xenophon's text, it's on my TBR, I don't know for sure.

Anyway, there is a lot of hanging out on Subways. A lot of people out doing weird daily business in the middle of the night, but I guess its New York City, and that's the city that never sleeps, so it makes sense? Maybe? I sure as hell didn't think so, but what do I know.

Overall, it was just a very average book. When you've already read A Clockwork Orange, this just seems like a relic of the past that was attempting to be sensational, but these days doesn't quite get there, and is kind of dull in a lot of places.

Loved it. Couldn't put it down. Ending was a little weak, but everything leading up to it was fabulous.