The Double Human... Yeah, Right.
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Author: James O'Neal
Title: The Double Human Genre: mystery? I haven't been able to decide who to blame for publishing the utter garbage that is James O'Neal's The Double Human. Should I blame O'Neal? Should I blame MacMillan, whose imprint Tor foisted this rubbish on an unsuspecting public? Or should I call for the head of some Tor editor on a plate after he or she let this crap slip through? I know: all three should be held culpable. Now that you know, however, you can avoid getting sucked in to picking this... this... thing... off the shelf to assault your eyes and brain. I suffered so that you need not. You're welcome. The Double Human is, apparently, a sequel to a previous book by O'Neal, The Human Disguise. O'Neal seems perpetually confused about whether his book is a police procedural - the story, is, after all, allegedly a serial-killer police procedural - or a scifi (SyFy?) novel about a race of immortals indistinguishable from humans except for their DNA. For the most part, the novel's about two cops, Tom Wilner and Steve Bessalia, who patrol southernmost Florida, just north of former Miami. The southern tip of the peninsula was kicked off the continent a couple of decades back, and is now a lawless "Zone" inhabited by the remnants of the city and refugees from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Wilner encounters "the Vampire" on page 1, and spends the next 300-plus pages chasing him - over a period of a few days, the murderer rams a slender spike through the neck of at least twenty people, instantly killing every one, and getting away with it unseen every time. Yeah, right. Wilner's back story includes the non-human immortals of the Simolit and Halleck families, but let's be honest: no one really cares. And there's also the impending arrival of the Urailians, whoever they might be, from somewhere in space. They're mentioned, briefly, exactly twice: you gotta love dangling plot threads. As plotting goes, The Double Human is about as poorly conceived and badly executed as any book I've ever read. The protagonists wander willy-nilly about south Florida, effortlessly passing across the "border" between Florida and the Zone as if it were a mere line in the sand - just what forces keep the Zone's citizenry penned up in their cage without even the most basic services remains a mystery. Yeah, right.
More specifically, Wilner encounters the killer - in person, and in broad daylight - in the first chapter, yet seems unable to recognize him the next several times he sees him. For his part, the killer is small and rather elderly, yet he regularly outruns and outfights larger and much younger victims. He also seems to have an endless supply of cash for the prostitutes he's about to kill, but has no visible means of support. Yeah, right. On a more general level, O'Neal should have probably spent less time watching Fox News and more time practicing his craft. He regularly introduces plot points almost glennbeckian in their level of paranoia: multiple references to Hugo Chavez as the "Hitler of South America," a sudden onset of "global cooling" instead of global warming (Miami's climate is more like the Seattle of today than a "sunshine state"), and jihadists lurking under every rock. The U. S. has been involved in multiple wars to liberate Muslim states, so much so that the armies are now filled with conscripted criminals - including, gasp! anyone caught with a firearm! Yeah, right. O'Neal's entitled to his political paranoia, of course; however, it's remarkably silly and ill-conceived most of the time. For instance, only Miami seems to have suffered this "global cooling"; everywhere else the weather is the same as in 2010 (how's that workin' for you anyway, James?). Technology has collapsed - no internet, for instance - yet there's a wireless communications network and the gub'mint has developed hydrogen-powered cars (that only gub'mint officials get to drive). Oh, and satellite communications blanket the peninsula, except the Zone is "shielded" - people can wander in and out through a porous physical boundary, but a technological boundary doesn't let wireless signals through? Yeah, right. O'Neal's logical failings are many. No matter how silly and illogical the plot, the book might still be fairly entertaining - that's the case in Walking Money, which O'Neal published under the pen name James O. Born. In this case, however, the book fails to be entertaining. It's filled with grammatical errors, for instance. What's worse, O'Neal has an irritating habit of hopping from subplot to subplot every five or six paragraphs, as if he couldn't write more then 200-300 words at a time about his plot. Perhaps the most literarily disgusting thing about The Double Human, however, is O'Neal's habit of starting almost every chapter with a character's name - and it's not just "Tom" or "Wilner," it's "Tom Wilner" every time - he even does so repeatedly throughout a single chapter! The first two words of chapter one are "Tom Wilner," and the first two words of chapter fifty-one (the last chapter) are also "Tom Wilner." It's as if O'Neal thinks his readers - those few able to reach the last chapter of this rubbish - need to be told the hero's name every time. How a "professional" could write like that and how an editor could allow such poor-quality writing to be published in that form are both inconceivable. Don't touch this with a ten-foot pole! all content copyright © 2014-present by scmrak
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