EPub The kills poison
Modelled on a masterpiece Roberto Bolano s cerebral epic 2666 this is a similarly monumental book over 1000 pages long that likewise takes an oblique approach to storytelling In short it s a stunner It eschews beautiful prose for confident writing that gets the job done but often this job is the creation of a clammy suspenseful atmosphere that infuses into the reader s life and it s fascinating to see writing of this kind put to that use Clouds of dread hang over the best pages of The Kills and I was reminded a little of another 21st century classic Michael Haneke s film Hidden House s novel although books play such a large role in its many twists and turns is intensely cinematic it s no surprise when eventually we find a film crew working on the margins of the story Gripping this novel remains until the last sentence though once you ve digested that last sentence you re left with an entirely intentional sense of blank space and I think that truly classic novels Bolano s included never leave you at all 1447237862 The probability that I m going to ever read this book is nonexistent If anyone in the US would like to have my hardcover copy it s yours I m happy to give it away because it takes up like three books worth of space Just leave a message pm me with an address and it s yours I will pay postage 1447237862 I m a sucker for an ambitiously scoped project but I wonder why this novel was the way it was Clear cues from Bola o 2666 and a dash of Durrellian structure THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET with spiritual homages to a ton of other things I enjoyed parts of the puzzle I particularly appreciated the focus being on contractors and innocents instead of the typical villains of war but I wonder if I should ve just watched MICHAEL CLAYTON again to get some of the same spiritual effect 1447237862 My favourite book in the Booker 2013 Longlist and possibly my favourite book s read in 2013 so far This Telegraph review sums up my feelings pretty well an epic read bursting with complexity brutality and meticulous planning without sacrificing on giving even the smallest and most tangential characters heart and three dimensionality I found the multimedia aspect I read the expanded editions a little jarring and tagged on at first but by somewhere in the second book was completely on board with them I don t think the same type of extras would work very well for most authors but in House s capable hands they certainly added extra depth and dimension to a text which didn t already need it Skip them if you like doesn t hurt the story to just read not play but if you can just go with it you won t be disappointed That aside I just loved it My first book s by this author but I will definitely now be seeking out and devouring everything else I can get my hands on Full marks Do it side note things I loved the most the stark environments of book 1 a question much like yes or no from the same book the opening chapter of book 2 the heads or tails interactivity at the start of book 3 I tossed a coin and read heads by the way the voicemails in book 1 the world war 2 back story moment Lila s story and the momentum at the start of book 4 when you have no idea wtf is going on but suddenly a whole lot of threads from throughout books 1 3 start returning in a big way So many tiny seemingly irrelevant details reflected and bounced around all four books over and over in different situations so much planning and care in every scene and sentence LOVED IT 1447237862 Had The Kills not been included in the Man Booker Prize long list I might not have heard of it But that fact combined with the premise of conspiracy and murder spanning the world and 1000 pages was enough to get me to pay attention As to be expected from a behemoth of a story which unfolds in four parts that were first released as separate e books the work as a whole is uneven I averaged out my ratings of each of the books and ended up with 3 lukewarm stars. The Kills epub file Book One Sutler gets 3 stars This one is a perfectly competent political thriller that gets you to care enough to stick around to find out what happens next Is characterization deep No But the haziness and unknown motives work well here We follow Stephen Sutler aka John Jacob Ford as he goes on the run from Iraq to Turkey to Malta He had assumed the fake of identity of Sutler and was working as a contractor to transform a burn pit site into a gleaming new Iraqi city for HOSCO a civilian company that s cornered the market on rebuilding the country after the war But in no time he gets a tip from the nefarious villain who had convinced him to take on this pretense in the first place Paul Geezler to disappear and use the money that he ll be able to access to stay disappeared Sutler soon finds out that he s been accused of absconding with 53 million and he s a pawn in a larger conspiracy orchestrated by Geezler. The kills arte Book Two The Massive gets 1 star This one is infuriatingly obscure opacity for the sake of opacity The bigger crime though is how House takes what should be a fascinating topic ripe for plumbing civilian and government malfeasance exploitation war and post war efforts through the eyes of civilian contractors and manages to make it unbearably tedious dull and exasperatingly pointless This section focuses on what happened before Sutler shows up as well as a bit of what happens after he disappears We spend time with some down on their luck men from the US who take up a job at the burn pits in Iraq as contractors for HOSCO destroying all of the trash that comes from the rebuilding HOSCO knows of the hazards this will wreak on their health and pretends to shut down the pits even as Geezler from Book One had just sent in this group of men When they return to America they ll all end up getting sick and die This section was torturous to get through It took me the longest to read and in the course of doing so I was lamenting how much I hated the book and hated my life This is not normal is it After having sunk into this book both money and time I was reluctant to stop though Foolish foolish The writing was super stilted The characters were one dimensional The main character who s the leader of the burn pit group Rem Gunnerson is a guy whose motivations relationship with his wife and actions were all opaque in a way that was not compelling but merely frustrating when it wasn t just plain dull As if the time spent with these guys wasn t boring enough the mind numbing torture escalates each time we have to follow Rem s wife back at home as she investigates the burn pits scandal intent on exposing the harm that they re causing to these men s health This is petty but I have to mention that when House writes the dialogues and perspectives of the American characters he kept using British isms that would never occur to an American to utter He frequently used the contraction of I have when have is the main verb as in I ve a dog back at home or treating collective nouns as plural as in HOSCO have sent their men to blah blah blah or using adjunct phrases like in future It drove me bats If I had been engrossed in a good story I might not have fixated on this so much but when a person feels like they re going to die of boredom these things take on an outsized quality of wrongness man Book Three The Kill gets 4 stars I was surprised that the person who wrote Book Two was the same one who wrote this book This is the only time that I felt the comparison to Roberto Bola o s 2666 which has been mentioned by others was closest The characterization seemed deeper despite the proliferation of them here in bursts There was a sense of tension and dread that simmered menacingly throughout to make it a delicious read. Book the killer angels Here we focus on a story that has little to do with the first two sections except as vague references to the incidents here that characters in the previous books make We re in Naples following a whole host of characters who are enmeshed in a twisted game of murder a Polish immigrant two prostitutes an Italian language student from Japan and a na ve writer to name a very few There s a book called The Kill that chronicles a supposed murder committed in the post WWII period in Naples years later two sick brothers come to Naples and appear to have committed a copycat murder a few years after that a young man visits Naples to write about the copycat cases and goes missing and a few years after that another young man is abducted supposedly by those same people but this time against a backdrop of a Hollywood filming of a movie based on those brothers actions The characterization of the various denizens orbiting the scene of the crime the ways that they re implicated saved or destroyed by the crime were head and shoulders above what s found in the previous two sections I didn t care that we hopscotched from one character to another to another and back each was a captivating enough character that I couldn t help but be absorbed in their lives all while the sinister threat of murder and perversion infused every part of the story ratcheting up the dread we feel as we turn the pages Book Four The Hit gets 3 stars The storylines from the previous books come together There s the eeriness from Book Three combined with the mysteriousness of the conspiracy from Books One and Two This time we re in Cyprus with a German diplomat s family the search for Sutler continues and we get a clearer idea of what Paul Geezler has up his sleeves I liked most of it because we re introduced to a creepy guy whose stories will sound familiar to us from Book Three But as the number of unrealistically stupid choices made by the diplomat s sister in law started to pile up the story lost me a little The common thread uniting all of the books is idea of the potency of storytelling the myriad ways uses and effects of storytelling Characters tell stories about their fake identities fall under the spell of others stories or use stories to manipulate people And then there s the idea of choice Characters can choose to take one direction or the other but there are always consequences They choose to go out alone and get attacked They choose to trust someone and get into a bind Even when they just stand still they re still choosing because there are repercussions from the non choice At the end House actually tries to tie all of the disparate plotlines together with this idea of choice which I find a bit forced but don t mind too much All in all this was a mixed bag of a reading experience I m too exhausted to care about checking out the supplementary videos that people have said were pretty good 1447237862 Librarian Note There is than one author with this name in the Goodreads database. The kills singer Richard House is an author film maker artist and university lecturer As well as the digital first novel The Kills he has written two previous novels Bruiser and Uninvited which were published by Serpent s Tail in the 1990s He is a member of the Chicago based collaborative Haha He is the editor of a digital magazine Fatboy Review site_link www. The kills ab net Born in Cyprus Richard House is an artist and writer His first novel Bruiser was short listed for the Ferro Grumley Gay Fiction Award in the USA The Kills has been longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize He currently teaches at Birmingham University UK Librarian Note There is than one author with this name in the Goodreads database. Who kills the witch king in the book Richard House is an author film maker artist and university lecturer As well as the digital first novel The Kills he has written two previous novels Bruiser and Uninvited which were published by Serpent s Tail in the 1990s He is a member of the Chicago based collaborative Haha He is the editor of a digital magazine Fatboy Review site_link www. The kills allmusic net Born in Cyprus Richard House is an artist and writer His first novel Bruiser was short listed for the Ferro Grumley Gay Fiction Award in the USA The Kills has been longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize He currently teaches at Birmingham University UK site_link This is The Kills Sutler The Massive The Kill The Hit The Kills is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy told in four books It begins with a man on the run and ends with a burned body Moving across continents characters and genres there will be no ambitious or exciting novel in 2013 In a ground breaking collaboration between author and publisher Richard House has also created multimedia content that takes you beyond the boundaries of the book and into the characters lives outside its pages. Book the killing fields com thekills The Kills The Kills 1 4 I don t need a book to end with a nicely wrapped package and a big bow but come ON The way this book was marketed I thought that things would come together and that there would be some sense to the thing I feel mislead This book could have should have been edited way down There were hundreds of pages of rolling pin reading just going back over the same thing over and over and over again So why didn t I just put it down Because the book started off so good I thought the author was going to come around after all the drivel and deliver Nope Can t think of anyone I d recommend this book to at the moment 1447237862 Note Minus one star for the inordinate number of typos and missing words Evidence of sloppy copy editing it is highly irritating in a novel of such length and complexity Having said that this is the fastest I have ever burned through a novel of over 1 000 pages The Kills is simply incendiary Once you begin reading it is nigh impossible to stop. The kills assai records I gave a grim little smile and heaved a huge sigh of relief when I reached the end well what counts for the ending in a meta novel that constitutes four separate but devilishly intertwined short novels. The kills ab Richard House has written a fiendish anti thriller that is essentially a serpentine languorous meditation on cause and effect Devotees of writers like Jeffrey Deaver and Jonathan Kellerman are likely to be befuddled at the lack of resolution here despite the overall length. The kills assai records It all begins in the Iraq desert where the monolithic HOSCO a pseudonym for Halliburton is siphoning off funds from the US government for infrastructure projects that exist only on paper Sutler which of course is not his real name becomes the fall guy in a massive fraud and flees for his life after a mysterious explosion destroys critical records. EBook The killstreak That flight sets in motion a series of events and repercussions that reverberate throughout The Kills becoming ever complicated and byzantine Volume three The Kill takes in a grisly murder in Naples the link to volume one Sutler is a fictional account of that murder read by a student on a bus that Sutler bumps into. Book the killing fields Reviews from Out and Lambda Literary have made much of the fact that Richard House is a gay writer operating in the very macho black and white thriller genre Author Philip Hensher a judge for the 2013 Man Booker price and who himself is gay urged readers to embrace The Kills Yes there are gay characters here However House performs a rather sly conjuring trick by making their orientation incidental but the consequences of their actions critical to the plot. The kills list of demands My favourite novel of the four is The Massive a jaw dropping account of the men who operate the burn pits at Camp Liberty in Iraq Following this almost over the top apocalypse The Kill about the Naples murder is a much quieter interlude that seems to bleed all the momentum from the narrative but it quickly segues into outright horror The Hit brings together and resolves many of the plot strands but raises as many questions as it answers. The kills las I must say I found the extra digital content included on the Pan Macmillan website to be of a distraction than it was worth I actually gave up following the e book links after the first two volumes as I was anxious for the story to unfold as quickly as possible I think the key to such extra content is to make it indispensable to the narrative itself here as with Marissa Peshl s recent Night Film the added bits and pieces are decorative as opposed to being structural. Deadpool kills the marvel universe again pdf House s deliberate strategy here of leaving characters and plot strands dangling and refracting events constantly through a prism of disinformation and paranoia could prove too alienating for many readers I was fascinated by how far he could logically take this House goes so much further than I could have imagined the novel slowly accretes a kind of grim mythic power that stays with the reader long after the last page is turned 1447237862 If you are going to tell your story in such a tired affectless slumped way you better have plenty of stuff happening If you don t have much happening look this guy thought about doing some online banking but then he didn t then you better have some good jokes or at least some local colour that we can t get from a travel guide or a tv documentary If you don t make me care about who stole what money from which government and who did or didn t get blown up by which fake organisation then I will write you a review like this one Your prose is so flat I want to see the iron you used on it I want to get my shirts like that Your characters are so interchangeable I figured they must be each other Your dialogue however that was very realistic What s the time I don t know I don t wear a watch Where are you travelling to I haven t made up my mind This was Number Three in my Absurdly Long Novels project and the third one star in a row I am seeing a pattern here Could it be the same as what happened to bands in the late 60s early 70s when they turned from smart 3 minute singles about mods and clothes with a neat 8 bar guitar break to double albums about when people evolve into dolphins and set sail for a better planet and oboes oboes oboes First two were Parallel Stories and Miss MacIntosh My Darling 1447237862 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. EBook The kills fleas 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. EBook The kills 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. Deadpool kills the marvel universe pdf 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 kills las 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. Who kills dracula in the book 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 1447237862 So I saw this in the WSJ review of books they liked it Saw the Booker prize mention and always fall for that Carefully read all the 3 star reviews What sealed the buy was that when I read the sampler I blew thru the whole thing and I wanted to keep going Figured out that Sutler was a patsy and I liked the writer s style. The kills list of demands I have now finished the first story of the 4 and took advantage of to let me return the book for a refund Harsh I know but I wasn t going to finish based on how the first story went A shame too because I liked the author s narrative style but not his choices. The kills list of demands What was good was that the author doesn t waste time setting a scene with typical it was a dark and stormy night stuff but focused on what his characters were actually thinking and doing So the narrative always had somewhere to go The main problem was that the narrative wasn t going anywhere all that interesting Midway I felt like I was in a hamster wheel just spinning inside an infinite circular track. The kills acoustic And so many possibilities the character Geezler who kicked off the whole embezzlement scheme that implicated Sutler was ignored in favor of a boy who Sutler met briefly and who tragically disappeared Another character who was to investigate Sutler was also interesting but his arc dwindled off without any confrontation with Sutler Instead we re left with a mother searching for her son and two videographers caught up with Sutler s incompetence and little of the two journalists who could have made the story a lot interesting So I suppose to sum up the story went off in the least interesting direction it could that of following Sutler s whims of identity and chronic indecision so he could fade out to white in the closing snowstorm Sigh 1447237862
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