Kay's Bookshelf

The book starts out at quite a good pace, alternating between the story of Karen and the accidents that occur because of the dust. I liked both Karen and Jerry and I had soon become emotionally involved in their attempts of destroying the thing plaguing their neighborhood. Unfortunately the pace was kept constant throughout the whole book (with Karen’s scenes rather few and far between, separated by lots of “accidents”), and what once was interesting kinda faded out after a while — after all, how many accidents can anyone be interested in? Not to mention it was getting hard to read about any new people (the author introduced anyone new with a bit of background, Sidney Sheldon style, quite a nice thing except when one knows that any new character is to be very much hurt or even killed). I think I, as a reader, was expected to dislike the dust more and more with each new accident, and root all the more for the characters. However it didn’t happen like this, my feelings towards it soon reached a plateau and… in a way it all went downhill from there as my interest partially faded.

At first I loved the premise of the book: a strange-looking dust came out of nowhere that does harm to people for the fun of it. Sort of like a “dusty” version of Predator. I was certain, all throughout reading, that we will probably never know where the dust came from, how and why. And I was OK with that (this is not a spoiler as you’ll have to read the book to find out whether I was right or wrong :P ). However as I was nearing the end of the book I started having a lot of questions regarding it. It’s funny actually if one thinks I had no problems with accepting the idea of a dust so evil that it kills people, but I couldn’t help having an issue with “how does it see?” and “how does it know human anatomy?” (it would need to know quite a bit of the latter in order to kill people as it did).

A few words about the cover: it it very simplistic but to tell the truth I kinda had fun with the it while reading. At times I amused myself thinking what I could have done instead, what image would I have set on the cover had I been the editor (or whoever gets to decide these things). While my ideas were more or less complicated, I always ended up considering that the initial concept (an image of the title character, on a stark, white background) also held a lot of promise, and I sort of fell in love with it. Sure, the quality of the image isn’t to die for (and I also had fun imagining what a really good graphic artist would do to the concept), but what I want to say here is that, surprisingly enough, I ended up appreciating the cover though I wouldn’t have thought so in the beginning (what with it being such a simplistic cover and so on).

What I liked most: The ending. Although everything happened quite fast I liked the idea behind it (quite original I would think). My only qualm about it is show spoiler

What I liked least: A pet peeve of mine while reading the book: the way the verb “to scream” was used at times. It may be just me (although Merriam-Webster seems to think so too), but to me the verb implies a shrill sound. In this context I have found its usage a bit forced every now and then, in cases where perhaps the verb “to cry” (not the teary kind) would have been a much better match (for example imagine Karen screaming “Mom!” on the phone when told she has a new blind date or someone screaming “Ow!” every now and then). But that’s just me.

Also, I was a bit bothered at times by the fact that Karen was always certain that, whenever something bad happened, it happened because of the dust. Imagine a dialogue going something like this:

Karen: “What happened to you?”
Neighbor: “A pan fell down and hit me.”
Karen: “Have you seen any strangely-colored dust?”
Neighbor: “No.”
Karen (to herself): “That’s what you think, but the dust was there.”

It’s obvious what the author’s been trying to do, make the dust attack in such a way that most people hurt don’t see it (lest there was talk of a strange-looking dust going around), and yet have Karen aware of all the “hits”. It didn’t quite work for me though, I like the reasoning the characters in books do to be based more on facts than groundless suppositions. I admit though that I had a hard time coming up with something better (other than Karen somehow being there and seeing the dust for herself; or perhaps videos or pictures of the accident scenes, where Karen noticed the dust but everyone else dismissed it as camera artifacts?)

Recommend it to? Anyone in the mood for an easy, uncomplicated reading (with some blood involved). This is the first book of the author and I may have been a bit harsh with it in my review (with the best intentions, of course, hoping that it will help the author notice what didn’t work that well in hopes of a great second novel — it would be a pity not to as the book was, albeit not perfect, among the better half of the self published books I came across).

See also:
The official site of Susan Berliner
An interview with her regarding Dust

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