Dan Brown's ORIGIN

Dan Brown's new novel, Origin, is causing people to debate this very successful author yet again. The first question people ask is, "Is Dan Brown a good writer?" The answer from most is a resounding, "No." His style is quite simple and written at grade-school level. A prose stylist he is not, a point that a majority of literary critics agree on.

Many say that Brown just keeps writing the same book over and over again. Robert Langdon, who we know little about after five novels, trades female companions and goes on great adventures to save the world in one or two days, maybe three. He does so with his encyclopedic knowledge of history, symbols, and ancient culture since he is, after all, a symbologist. Are his books formulaic? Yes, without a doubt, but that can be said about a lot of successful series of genre fiction. One must ask, however, how many times can an author keep going to the same well?

One of the things I find aggravating about Dan Brown's novels is that he seems hell-bent on disproving God in the vein of the New Atheism. Science can't prove God, so God doesn't exist. Well, that's just BS. God is defined as a supernatural being, and science, therefore, cannot be expected to find a supernatural being using the tools of natural science. Let me say that again. The natural cannot prove the supernatural. It's Philosophy 101. So I find some of Brown's novels, or sections therein, to be a bit tedious. Yawn. Give it up, Dan.

I've noticed that about fifty percent of reviews for Origin on Amazon are not glowing, shall we say, and point to the above issues--and many more. So what makes people keep coming back for more? He seems to be a novelist people love to hate--and hate to love.

I was amused by one review that stated, "Dan Brown's books have become long, tiresome reference books chock-full of history that become downright boring." Point well-taken. And excuse us, Robert Langon, if we don't all know the history of every monument in Italy or haven't read every arcane text written three thousand years ago. You really are quite insufferable and elitist sometimes.

Dan Brown's novels are as poorly edited as they are poorly written. And I've never read any of his novels in which I couldn't find dozens of major grammatical errors. But the publisher hears those sales ring up and, well, you get my point.

Whatever Brown's faults may be, he is a master at narrative pacing, which caught everyone's attention in The Da Vinci Code. People then went back and read Digital Fortress and Deception Point, and Brown became a household name. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy reading Dan Brown, although I skipped Inferno and will wait for Origin to hit the remainder bin at B&N.

It occurs to me that I'm almost finished this post and haven't really talked about Origin. I've gone on too many tangents. Well, so do Dan Brown and Robert Langdon.

The phenomenon of Dan Brown shows that publishing is about making money, as well it should be. But the truth is that if anyone other than Brown submitted these novels, they would be rejected. Once you get fame and fortune, the old saying goes, you can publish your laundry list. I'm sure Robert Langdon could find meaningful clues to saving the world in such a list. If you rearrange the letters in "laundry detergent," you might get words like "dry," "deter," "gent," "laud," "great," "ten," and many others. I could combine them and find meaning for the combinations if I tried hard enough, but no one would me a twenty million dollar advance. Go figure.

One of these days, I'm going to self-publish my laundry list just for the hell of it. Really.

~William Hammett

Poetry Collection: Day and Night

I'm pleased to announce that Word Wrangler Press will publish my collection of poems titled Day and Night in 2018. I've been away from poetry for a while, but this will be a nice change of pace although I will still be ghostwriting and publishing fiction under my own name.

I have previously published poetry in literary journals such as American Poets & Poetry, The Rockford Review, Lynx, Poem, The Lyric, Pegasus, Twilight Ending, Mojo Risin', Creative Juices, Tight, Angelflesh, The Black Buzzard Review, and others.

Not very many people read poetry, classic or modern, and that's a pity since the form is as old as writing. The number of people who read poetry is about the same as those who listen to classical music, which is about five percent of the population.

Reading poetry, of course, is more challenging than reading a modern novel, especially genre fiction. The syntax is challenging, and that is especially true of modern poetry from T.S. Eliot on, where the compression of language makes scanning lines difficult. In some cases, modern poetry has no syntax at all and is highly experimental. But is reading such poetry any different than listening to a symphony or complex string quartet? Not really.

The rewards of reading poetry or listening to classical music are great. Anything worthwhile requires a little effort. Or a lot.

Thanks for stopping by.

~William Hammett