‘Wonderland‘ sounded like the perfect fit for the Creepy Carnivals square in Halloween Bingo. A serial killer in an amusement park – could it be more on target?

I listened to the opening chapter and thought, ‘Yeah, this has the potential to be Jaws in an amusement park with the Chief of Police trying to keep the Park open the way the mayor in Jaws wanted the beaches kept open.’

Then I made a tactical error. I set the book aside for a little while because it wasn’t convenient to listen to an audiobook. In the interim, I read three ebooks for Halloween Bingo, all of which were four-star or five-star reads. The problem with consuming a rich diet of well-crafted prose is that when I pick up something where the prose is lazy and clichéd, I grimace, the way that I do when I move from a cafetière of freshly ground coffee to the hot brown stuff pushed out by a vending machine. When I continued with ‘Wonderland‘ today, I kept getting distracted by the lazy prose and the clichéd characterisations and lost interest in the story.

What do I mean by lazy prose? The kind where not a single word surprises me, where I know what’s coming in every paragraph and where I’m never once tempted to highlight a phrase or a passage because it captured both an idea and my imagination. Today, the prose dropped below that level to the, ‘How did this get past a re-read of the first draft?’ Here’s an example.

“Their eyes met at the same instant.”

How can their eyes meet any other way?

Then there was the lazy use of sex as a shortcut to characterisation. First, I had an extended scene with a thirty-seven-year-old manager lusting after a seventeen-year-old boy whom she was interviewing for a job, who got so excited that, as soon as the interview was over, she had to lock her office door and masturbate while calling his name. What’s the problem with that? Firstly, I don’t believe it. Secondly, the presentation of the manager was one-dimensional. She’s shown only as a sexual predator addicted to sex with men half her age. That’s a little unfair, there was also just a suggestion that she’d lost her own ‘innocence’ (not my choice of word) and hope in the world because of something that her uncle did when she was a teenager. I took this as another clichéd shortcut to characterisation.

Then I sat through a scene where I head-hopped between the woman who will lead the investigation into the serial killer and the man who will represent the amusement park as they silently expressed their surprise at how attractive eachfound the other, even more attractive than they’d foumd them to be when they’d met as strangers in a bar the night before, gotten drunk and then had sex, followed by the woman, who’d given a false name, sneaking away in the early hours. It seemed contrived to me. It was also clumsily executed.

After an hour of listening, I realised that I had no patience for characters drawn in crayon and words that had been flung on the page with little thought and less editing. I don’t normally abandon a book after only listening to 15% of it but this was definitely a case of “Life’s too short for reading poorly written books.”