Museum: Black Knight Chronicles

Rating:
Summary: spousal revenge
Review: MUSEUM is a rip-snortin' read in need of editing, in which a thoughtful inmate tells the story of two devious spouses from damaged childhoods, with evil on their minds, greed in their hearts & operating with no holds barred.

Rebeccasreads recommends MUSEUM as a saga of revenge that roller-coasters throughout South Florida. Quite a lot of violence, & someone does get away with murder, no matter how righteous it may seem to be.

Rating:
Summary: mind-numbing and tedious
Review: With a single-word monumental title, the author of "Museum" seems to be attempting to tap into the literary mystique of his father. Roger Hailey boasts he is the "first son of Master Novelist Arthur Hailey" who brought us chilling thrillers "Hotel", "Airport", "Wheels", and "The Moneychangers" in the '70's and '80's. I have a distant memory of having read "Airport" in my early-to-middle adolescence. With that book, I recall an early sensation that kept me turning pages to find out what happens next. Regretfully, I must report that the gift of storytelling responsible for this phenomenon was not passed to the next generation.

In this first book of the series Black Knight Chronicles we are introduced to Michael Donley, an African American casualty of the drug war. "The Black Knight", as his fellow inmates refer to Donley, is a prison trustee serving a five-year sentence in Broward county jail for possession of marijuana with intent to sell. His kind nature and insightful intellect convinces the jail's head sergeant to give Michael certain privileges and responsibilities. The Black Knight takes on the chore of orienting new inmates to prison life, which introduces us to "new fish", Johnny Rainco.

Johnny's story as told by Michael regards his problematic marriage to Lisa Rainco the reason he is in the joint, as she has had him arrested for slapping her one evening for searching his wallet. We are given a generous amount of nasty details regarding power struggles and infidelity leaving little doubt that Johnny and Lisa have had a less than ideal relationship over their ten years together. Johnny also meets jailhouse "shark" Thomas Tremane (a-k-a "the Lover") while locked-up and proceeds to discuss his life's misadventures with someone who is obviously a very bad man. Johnny stupidly accepts Thomas' offer to be hired as the man who 'helps' him with his problems, with predictably messy results.

Grammatical and typographical errors are plentiful in this book, as well as a generally annoying tendency to use a large, bold font for what I would imagine to be the author's version of a suspenseful twist of plot. The only benefit of this practice seems to be that the reader may see what revolting occurrence is about to happen and save their precious time from reading an entire overly verbose build-up!

The story's only tie to its title is a beating and rape that takes place in the Vizcaya Museum among rare and beautiful works of art. The almost pornographic level and frequency of sex, violence, violent sex and sexual violence within the pages of this book is mind-numbing and tedious. Over the course of this story we are given redundantly over-descriptive backgrounds of the generally unenlightened characters, which leaves us with little reason to sympathize or empathize with them in all of their generally lousy situations. There is little or no love here. I'm very glad I didn't read this book when I was 12 years old, and I hope that you and your children are spared as well.


Rating:
Summary: Brutally bad.
Review: [Note: six hundred words cut from review to satisfy Amazon length requirements.]

Roger Hailey, Museum (iUniverse.com, 2004)

I have read, to date, one hundred sixty-nine books in 2004. Not too shabby. Actually, I should say I have read one hundred sixty and fed nine to the dustbunnies.

When you think about the amount of unbearably bad crap being written out there, it's rather amazing that someone can get through a hundred sixty-nine books in one year and only find nine that are so unbearably bad the reader can't keep reading. As well, it may speak to the iron-stomached nature of the reader; I did, after all, actually make it to the last page of Left Behind.

In its defense, Museum is not the worst book I have ever read. (That honor goes to Sue Doro's collection of so-called poetry Heart, Home, and Hard Hats.) I do believe, however, it may be the worst novel I have ever read. The first fifteen pages were so mind-crushingly bad that I put off getting through the last thirty-five until today, then gulped them down at lunch like a Big Mac meal left in a hot car for two weeks when you're stone broke; you know you need to do it, but you can't before steeling yourself for a long, tedious bout of food poisoning and projectile vomiting to follow.

I'd offer you a storyline, but I really couldn't find one in here. It's as if Hailey (son of the notoriously bad writer Arthur Hailey, whose potboiler Airport was singlehandedly responsible, when turned into a movie, for the whole subgenre of seventies big-disaster flicks) decided to try taking the film adaptation of Stephen King's wonderful story "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and cross it with the equally trite and boring late-eighties Tom Selleck vehicle An Innocent Man, and turn the whole mess into the first novel in a proposed series. The Black Knight himself is a prison inmate doing five years for possession with intent to distribute (and while Hailey's obvious stance that marijuana should be legalized is admirable, its delivery in this book is so transparent and so strained that it makes Kurt Vonnegut's antiwar posture seem subtle and charming by comparison) who, in his own words, helps out the new fish and protects them from the sharks. Despite the meaning there being quite obvious, Hailey takes pages upon pages to explain it to you. In fact, I don't think the man ever met a subtext he wasn't compelled to clarify, over and over again. If he has, it's not in this novel.

So much for the declarative bits. How's the dialogue? After all, a truly crappy novel can be redeemed ever so slightly if you get Quentin Tarantino to write the dialogue for it. Well, that might have helped, but Hailey didn't. The dialogue is even worse. Much has been made of the authenticity of the dialogue in The Leatherstocking Tales; just imagine The Leatherstocking Tales being transformed to South Florida in the twenty-first century. The subject, said new fish from the above paragraph, is a dot-com business owner (note: the site he is supposed to own does exist, carries Museum, and is based in Miami; one wonders how autobiographical this book is) with scads of money, and attempts to be dignified throughout, so when he bursts out into sudden bouts of cursing, that's obviously meant to convey that he's hit his boiling point. It's about as authentic as a backwoods injun speaking the eighteenth-century King's English. The only thing it conveys is humor, and not gentle humor, either.

Okay, so everything I've said here (well, except for that dustbunny bit) could be said about most porn novels, right? So you have to be thinking "there's sex in this book!" And you're correct, there is most certainly sex in this book. And it comes (no pun intended, natch) right around page fifty, and thus was a natural place to motivate the reader to keep going. I had really thought Hailey a canny little so-and-so there for about three sentences. But my cod and his son haddock, I've read porn novels with better sex scenes. (I refer you to a fine little novel called Mitzi and Fern, but only if you have an iron stomach. Some of the kinkiness therein is of a nature that nauseates even me. But most of the sex scenes are great. Or, if you need literary pretensions and don't mind blatant misogyny, Pan Pantziarka's House of Pain. Unforgivably brutal, morally reprehensible in every way, and so well-written you'll read it in one sitting. Then, of course, there is Bataille's Story of the Eye, which no less an authority on porn than Andrea Dworkin called "the only piece of pornography worth reading." But I digress.) You're pretty much guaranteed one of the worst sex scenes in history-- and a rather scary glimpse into the mind of someone who objectifies women to an unhealthy extent-- when a vagina is referred to as "her center."

So, you've got bad explication, worse dialogue, and sex that's so truly awful you'll feel the need to take a shower afterwards, even if you watch Dark Brothers films on a regular basis. (No, Greg Dark's Britney Spears video doesn't count.) There is not a single redeeming quality about this novel, including the author's trumpeted heritage. Now, this is something I should have realized when I saw the publisher; I have yet to come across an iUniverse.com book that is in any way worthwhile. They have, however, hit a new low with Museum. Unless Sue Doro releases another collection of intestinal spew onto the planet, this is guaranteed to be at the top of 2004's "avoid like the plague" list. (zero)