One Year Gone

I'll admit: I read this book because I was disappointed in how much was left to the imagination between seasons and wanted some inspiration for a fanfic. Trouble is, I've read fanfiction which gets the details and characterization better than this book did and I've written fanfic with more heart and more research put into the details.

The actions taken by characters are sometimes completely ludicrous (such as Dean being desperate enough to try bringing Sm back with the Necronomicon or blowing up a public building simply as a distraction) and their personalities are... well, if you squint, you can sort of see echoes of who they should be. Lisa is no longer a single mom who's worried for her son's safety and a little grumpy when it comes to matters of raising him; she's a complete and utter bitch at times and a curmudgeon at others in ways which feel like someone took “she was rude to Dean that one time when he taught her son to use violence to stop bullies” and warped it into “she's a shitty person.” I hated how she was portrayed: one-dimensional and annoying.

Dean doesn't have the same heart and emotion that he does in the show. He often feels distant and more like a weird shifter-version of Dean than the one from the show. Sam... well, he's soulless, and soulless Sam was a monstrous machine, so I guess there's plenty of leeway there. However, he's often shown as having emotionally-driven thoughts and actually feeling things, which isn't how he was portrayed in the show. Aside from a moment where Ben and Dean have a cool, wordless communication during the action, Ben felt stale and distant and more like his child-self than his teen-self from the show. Except more cardboard cut out and less kid with a few cool traits.

Side characters range from uselessly cardboard and uninteresting to getting too much page time... while also being either boring or under-developed (and sometimes both). And the plot is, to put it kindly, one which I would only watch once if it were a television episode. There were some inaccuracies in the historical elements and an awful lot of weirdness that you'd think would have long-lasting repercussions yet didn't.

I kept reading for the glimpses of interesting details - such as Dean struggling with alcoholism and depression in Sam's absence, Dean getting chances to be badass, bonding moments between Ben and Dean, and a vague hope that it would get better. It never really did, unfortunately, and by the end of the book I was exhausted of reading it and just glad it was over. I wouldn't say I hated it, but I also wouldn't say I liked more than a few pieces.