- Year first released: 2010
- ISBN of the edition I read: 9780765328434
- Publisher of the edition I read: Tom Doherty Associates
- My rating (out of 5): 1.5
As much as I love horror video games, I haven't (yet) gotten around to the 2010 game Alan Wake. It's on my list to play - in fact, I've owned it for awhile now - I just haven't touched it yet. Weird, since it's gotten almost universally positive reviews.
This novelization of the game came out the same year. And, as I explained in my post Guilty Pleasures, I'm rather a sucker for video game novelizations.
That said, giving a review about a novelization has an interesting dilemma: if there is anything amiss with the plot, you can't actually blame the author - at least not quite as much as if the author had invented the story himself.
And, though I still haven't played the game to compare it to the book, I have to say: there is definitely something amiss with the plot. I'll give Burroughs the benefit of the doubt and not pin it on him, but it certainly impacts my feelings about the book, and so needs to be discussed.
First, to give you an idea of the premise:
Popular horror author Alan Wake and his wife, Alice, head to the tiny island town of Bright Falls, Washington for a three-week vacation. Almost as soon as they get there, things go mighty wrong and Alice ends up missing. Alan then spends the rest of the book hunting her down, grappling with some sort of clunky, manifest-darkness/evil/possessed/monster/something-or-others with downright annoying speech patterns. (Yes, they talk, unfortunately.)
This is a fine setup (except for the monster talk). The mystery effectively leaves you scratching your head until near the end of the book - a necessary trait for suspense. And the main twist near the end was fairly clever, though not quite as fleshed out as it needed to be, especially considering how complex everything is.
...actually, I think I said that too nicely.
To be more clear:
At some point, it's almost as though the writer (whether Burroughs or the game's writer, I can't say) seems to hit a wall and say, "That's enough explaining; you kind of just have to accept it from here on out."
Um...why?
This is flat laziness. If you, the creator, can't even explain the complexity, then most likely the pieces don't actually fit together that well. (Indeed, they don't in this book.)
Further, though I won't go into spoiler territory here, there's a big splash right at the very end which it seems we're expected to accept as "It simply has to be this way." Yet I could think of no plot reason that it really had to be this way. Could there really not have been a different ending? - I'm sure there could have been, if the writer had taken a bit more time to sort it out before throwing it at us.
Aside from these gripes about the plot, there are a couple other points that should be said:
The setting felt rather unfocused. Bright Falls was certainly a great place for this sort of situation to occur. Yet Burroughs really didn't quite give us enough of a feel for the island town to really put together the imagery and scenery for ourselves. Perhaps he assumed we would have already played the game (and, therefore, already have a mental image of the island)? - it's hard to say. Either way, the location and atmosphere of the book felt like a missed opportunity.
This novelization of the game came out the same year. And, as I explained in my post Guilty Pleasures, I'm rather a sucker for video game novelizations.
That said, giving a review about a novelization has an interesting dilemma: if there is anything amiss with the plot, you can't actually blame the author - at least not quite as much as if the author had invented the story himself.
And, though I still haven't played the game to compare it to the book, I have to say: there is definitely something amiss with the plot. I'll give Burroughs the benefit of the doubt and not pin it on him, but it certainly impacts my feelings about the book, and so needs to be discussed.
First, to give you an idea of the premise:
Popular horror author Alan Wake and his wife, Alice, head to the tiny island town of Bright Falls, Washington for a three-week vacation. Almost as soon as they get there, things go mighty wrong and Alice ends up missing. Alan then spends the rest of the book hunting her down, grappling with some sort of clunky, manifest-darkness/evil/possessed/monster/something-or-others with downright annoying speech patterns. (Yes, they talk, unfortunately.)
This is a fine setup (except for the monster talk). The mystery effectively leaves you scratching your head until near the end of the book - a necessary trait for suspense. And the main twist near the end was fairly clever, though not quite as fleshed out as it needed to be, especially considering how complex everything is.
...actually, I think I said that too nicely.
To be more clear:
At some point, it's almost as though the writer (whether Burroughs or the game's writer, I can't say) seems to hit a wall and say, "That's enough explaining; you kind of just have to accept it from here on out."
Um...why?
This is flat laziness. If you, the creator, can't even explain the complexity, then most likely the pieces don't actually fit together that well. (Indeed, they don't in this book.)
Further, though I won't go into spoiler territory here, there's a big splash right at the very end which it seems we're expected to accept as "It simply has to be this way." Yet I could think of no plot reason that it really had to be this way. Could there really not have been a different ending? - I'm sure there could have been, if the writer had taken a bit more time to sort it out before throwing it at us.
This is all too bad, because the secret behind everything could have made for a much better story - in fact, I'm tempted to say it deserved a better story.
The setting felt rather unfocused. Bright Falls was certainly a great place for this sort of situation to occur. Yet Burroughs really didn't quite give us enough of a feel for the island town to really put together the imagery and scenery for ourselves. Perhaps he assumed we would have already played the game (and, therefore, already have a mental image of the island)? - it's hard to say. Either way, the location and atmosphere of the book felt like a missed opportunity.
Also, the movement from one scene into the next was often downright jarring. We'll have Alan falling asleep in a bed somewhere, then, in the very next paragraph, he's crashing his car into a tree.
...wait - what? When did he get behind the wheel? Is this a dream? (Oh, and yes - lots of sections of the book are dreams, which made the overall picture quite confusing about which pieces we really needed to know/pay attention to for the sake of the actual mystery at hand. A huge rookie mistake, if ever there was one.)
It often felt like pieces of the narrative were simply missing - and not for any particular, plot-driven reason; the creator just didn't feel like including them, I guess.
Ultimately, Alan Wake delivers an intriguing mystery - albeit with a bad ending - but wrapped up in a disarrayed, difficult-to-follow package. I'll still play the game eventually, in hopes that the presentation is more sensible there. The book was just plain messy, though.
😂
ReplyDelete