Last book I read?

Oh, it's a sad, sad day when a friend asks you what the last book you've read is, and not only does it take you four minutes to remember what book it was, but the book was actually crap.

In all fairness, it wasn't complete crap, just mostly crap.

The book in question is Carpe Demon. I read it on the way to Chico nearly two months ago. Two! I haven't even finished the latest Harry Potter for goodness sake. Sigh.

Kris purchased the book for me a few days before our drive to Chico. We had been at Borders, nominally for Kris to purchase the soundtrack to Wicked. In as much as I love bookstores (having worked at bookstores for over five years in high school and college), I wasn't quite ready to leave when Kris was ready.

Well, Kris was completely ready to leave, so even though I was resisting, he was insisting. After a few moments, Kris turned to me and said, "I'm getting in line. You can put whatever books you want into my hands until I get to the register, but I'm leaving now."

Um...

Okay!

I immediately plunked the stack of books in my hands into Kris' arms, and followed him out of the stacks. Along the way, I started picking up books and adding them to Kris' pile. A couple of them were ones I had been thinking of purchasing, but wasn't quite ready to get (realizing I had a 2' stack of books at home not yet read), but some of them were completely spontaneous.

Like the Carpe Demon book, whose sub-title of the book is "The Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom."

The back cover makes it sound interesting:

Lots of women put heir careers aside once the kids come along. Kate Connor, for instance, hasn't hunted a demon in ages...

That must be why she missed the one wanderin through the pet food aisle of the San Diablo Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, he managed to catch her attention an hour later -- when he crashed into the Connor house, intent on killing her.

Now Kate has to clean up the mess in her kitchen, dispose of a dead demon, and pull together a dinner party that will get her husband elected to County Attorney -- all without arousing her family's suspicion. Worse yet, it seems the dead demon didn't come alone.

It's time for Kate Connor to go back to work.

I read the first three pages in the store, to see if I could stand the writer's voice. It seemed okay, so sure, why not?

Well, by the end of the first chapter, I realized why not.

The style of writing was annoying. She was unable to make any statements of actions without explaining them to death. And the descriptions weren't entertaining either. Quite often the author tried too hard to create the scene and character voices, managing to just annoy me instead. An example:

"Mo-om." She managed to make the word two syllables. "You don't have to be gross."

Writing the word as two syllables puts both of them into my head as I read them, I don't need the description afterward.

The plot was predictable. The character development was unsatisfying and shallow. The lead character, Kate, pretty much had to be an idiot to behave the way she does in the book. And her husband? A complete moron.

The parts that should be exciting, the fight scene descriptions, for example, were lame and boring.

The book is 360 pages long, and satisfyingly thick. Until you open it and realize the paper is thick, the lines widely spaced, the font large and there are less than 300 words per page.

The part I think I found the worst was on page 279:

"Demons are the bad guys," Ediie said. "And believe you me, I've known some bad ones in my time, that's for sure."
I opened my mouth to get a word in, but Eddie rambled on.
"Vial things. And the stench? Hoo-boy..." he made a strong motion as if to dispel the odor.

Vial.

Sounds a lot like "vile," eh?

Yeah.

That was the one I remembered, but there were a number of misspellings in the book that were really annoying. Those, and a series of grammar errors just grated on my nerves.

Bleh.

The book sucked. Time to get this copy out of the house.