Book Review: "The Good and The Ghastly" by James Boice

Title: The Good and the Ghastly

Author: James Boice

Publisher: Scribner

ISBN, PUB Date: 978-1-4165-7544-3, June 14, 2011

Reviewed by: Denien Robbins for Author Exposure

From publisher:

From a young author who has been compared to Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Pahlaniuk, comes a gangster noir epic set a thousand years into the future.

It's the thirty-fourth century and the nuclear apocalypse has come and gone. Civilization has rebuilt itself, and the results are eerily similar to the early part of the twenty-first century. But there are a few notable differences. Visa owns everything. Deer are the most common domesticated animal. And misinterpretations of pre-apocalyptic history run amuck (e.g. Palin established the theory of natural selection). But what hasn't changed is the nature of good and evil.

The Good and the Ghastly centers around two people linked through violence. Mobster Junior Alvarez has risen from child street thug to criminal overlord. He is a reprehensible man who will go to incredible lengths to get what he wants--power--and he desires to live however he pleases, without compromise. The intensity of his quest is matched only by that of the middle-aged mother of one of Alvarez's first victims. She has gone vigilante and is hunting down mobsters. The two are willing to go to the ends of the earth to manifest their wills--one good, one ghastly, both ruthless.

A wild satire of our own society, The Good and the Ghastly is a visceral novel informed with Boice's unnerving sense of reality and pathology. It is also an honest, old-fashioned, good-versus-evil story--with a twist of modern-day madness.

Denien’s review:

The plot is interesting and seems to promise a good read. Unfortunately, the characters were rather one dimensional and not easily related to by the reader. With only the barest of surface showing, it was difficult to get into their minds or feel a kinship with them.

The Good and the Ghastly is not a book that I would recommend to friends. The story is too far-fetched and "out there" even for those of us with good imaginations. I simply could not get into it.