Charlie Garner has a bad feeling. His ex-wife, Meg, has been missing for over a week and one quick peek into her home shows all her possessions packed up in boxes. Neighbors claim she’s running from bill collectors, but Charlie suspects something more sinister is afoot. Meg was last seen working at the local donut shop, a business run by a shadow group most refer to as ‘The Saucer People’; a space-age, evangelist cult who believe their compound to be the site of an extraterrestrial Second Coming.
Along with his brother, Felix, and beautiful, randy journalist Amelia “Scrappy” Moon, Charlie uncovers strange and frightening details about the compound (read: a massive, doomsday storehouse of weapons, a leashed chimpanzee!) When the body of their key informer is found dead with his arms ripped out of their sockets, Charlie knows he’s in danger but remains dogged in his quest to rescue Meg.

I picked up ‘Donut Legion’ because I usually enjoy Joe Lansdale’s stuff and the reviewers I follow rated this one highly. Sadly, after a couple of hours (27%) I had to accept that this one wasn’t doing it for me.

I was struggling to engage with the story even though the plot worked well enough, the prose was functional, the dialogue was lively, the characters were larger-than-life and some of the humour made me laugh.

It’s a book I should have been relishing for its dry humour and for its evisceration of cult culture. I kept nodding my head at comments from characters about how people’s need to believe can be manipulated by those who have never believed in anything except their own right to whatever they want.

When I thought about it, I could see that my problem was the main character. Charlie Garner. Charlie’s the kind of man I ought to find it easy to engage with. He’s a literate, autodidact with a clear view of himself and a penchant for independent thinking. Yet, telling the story through his eyes got in the way of my engagement with the story. To me, he seemed more like a vacancy than a presence. He should have had skin in the game, given that he was on a quest to rescue his ex-twife but I couldn’t feel it. He was smart, sometimes witty, resourceful and persistent but I couldn’t make an emotional connection to him. He felt more like a plot device than a person.

So, I’m letting the mystery of the saucerpeople and their donuts go, while I move on to my next book.