'The Book of Air and Shadows'—1/5

After reading Katy Hays' The Cloisters (thanks for that recommendation, random Jeopardy! clue), I was a bit intrigued by a handful of more book-based thrillers. Stories like The Book of Air and Shadows, The Dumas Club (probably better known as the Depp film The Ninth Gate), The Cloisters, a bit like Howzell Hall's We Lie Here. All of those were enjoyable thrillers and, while you can get down into the nitty-gritty and split some hairs about believability or pushing the willing suspension of disbelief just a pinch too far, it's also a thriller: a reader knows what they want to read when they pick it up, the author just has to provide us with a plausible-enough reason to get us there, catalyze the plot into motion, and then to take us through to the end. Ideally with at least one likable character.

This last part, in particular, is where The Book of Air and Shadows falls flat. We have two male protagonists who are, frankly, just unlikable to the extreme. Unlikable characters can be written and enjoyed, no question about that (Walt keeps us on his side most of Breaking Bad, Saul got his own spinoff, Deadpool got greenlit). But these characters do something to intrigue and draw us in. They don't begin as shitheels and stay that way. 

In this book, we've got Jake: a man from a checkered background (half-Jewish on one side, other side has a nazi; thematically, this doesn't really tie in and just seems like an odd attempt to be edgy, especially when the author/character seemingly embrace the theory that the nazi grandma married the Jewish grandpa for some weird genetic supremacy reasons, making him a Hitler dream-child ubermensch. It's fuckin' weird.). Oh, and Jake's obsessed with sex. We get all the details on that, including how he's fucked each of his best friend's wives (doesn't seem like a very good friend, but what do I know? I don't fuck my friends' wives and then act stunned when they don't want to be my friend anymore). His speech championing the virtues of fascism which gets one of these liberal ex-wives to drop her panties is not only cringe-worthy, it makes me wonder whether Gruber has ever spoken to a woman in his life. If so, I apologize to that woman.

If you see this and think, "What a great opener," you might be Michael Gruber

Our other male lead is a real charmer, too. Crosetti, who for some reason in my head ended up looking an awful lot like Frank from 30 Rock but without any of the redeeming qualities or humor, is there to remind neckbeards everywhere that there is hope for your greasy-fingered, pizza-faced, "tire for a gut," living-at-home, deadbeat asshole to end up with a woman way out of his league. Crosetti is such a charmer with women that shortly after his introduction, he helps the female lead/his love interest (who, naturally, this "nice guy" ends up with) and when she falls asleep, his first thoughts are to debate between raping her and a panty raid. Thankfully, he does neither, but he does insist on creeping on her and taking the sheet off her to ogle her sleeping, defenseless body. Later, in typical "this was written by a guy with no understanding of how people work" style, he finds out that his love interest is a former victim of extreme sexual abuse, and naturally does his best to fuck the pain away with his magic cock.

Really seems like the kind of guy a woman wants to end up with: creepy, fat, no job prospects, might just sexually assault you on a whim! What's not to love? 

There's plenty of other stuff to love in here, too, that makes it unclear whether the author is deliberately absurd or just forgot where he was going with a scene. One of my favorites was a shootout where many shots are fired, people are injured, law enforcement is called, the whole street is on high-alert, and the ubermensch Jew-nazi saves the day by fighting off—what, two, three, four?—armed guys, taking one of their guns and using it to kill a hostage-taker like something out of The Expendables. Not long after a description of the man's brains plastered all over the living room wall, we get the internal "badass" monologue from the super-cool tough-guy hero about how this proves his lifelong point about how harmless pistols are. Yeah, so harmless there's literally a "spray" of blood, bones, and brain behind you.

The plot kinda outs itself as a joke considering as an author, you've got basically two options: you can make your story about the lost Shakespeare play, or you can make your story about the forged Shakespeare play and how the con was pulled off. Or, you can take the third, hidden Gruber option and spend probably half of four-hundred pages filled with ogling and sexualizing every female character and writing your odd fantasies out, then skim over the lost play, imply it might be a forgery, and instead of explaining how such a con could have been pulled off, hand-wave it away with a simple sentence about how "someone explained how it could be done," and move on.

I wanted to like this book, really, I did. I first started considering DNFing it about a quarter of the way in and when I look back, I'm not entirely sure why I didn't. At least there are plenty of other, better books (and authors) out there. The Book of Air and Shadows does seem to be a bit divisive as a book, per other reviews I've seen, so it's clear where I fall on this: I don't think it's an awe-inspiring masterpiece. I think it's a meandering, bloated waste of paper with an interesting premise that gets lost way too often in Gruber apparently typing in little vignettes for masturbation breaks during editing. But then, maybe I'm just a simple man: I want my plumbers 'fixing the pipes' and donkey-dicked pizza guys left to pornos and wise old mystics and dogged detectives in my fiction.