 My shirt matches the book. Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to Retro Book Reviews. Today we're talking, you've already seen the title, so let me just hold up the book. We're talking about Along Came a Spider by James Patterson. If you're a fan of the channel, you will know I don't like James Patterson, but this is the book that started my, I guess, not my love affair, but my eighth affair for James Patterson, because so many people are like, James Patterson wasn't bad back in the day. I don't like him nowadays, or before I read this, I didn't like him because he uses ghost writers, well not ghost writers, he uses other writers to write his books so that he can pump them out as quick as possible. I think in one interview he said he can't even, he can't keep up with how quick his brain plots, so he now uses other people to write his books, but beside all that, I figured okay, let me go back to this dude's first book. This might not actually be the first one, it might be Kiss the Girls, I don't know, don't really care, but let me go back to his first book. I found this at the local bookstore and I picked it up for, I think it was like three bucks, and I'm really mad that I paid that much for it. Also, just holding this book right now, I'm noticing it's from Grand Central Publishing. I have never enjoyed a book published by Grand Central Publishing, that's interesting to me. Maybe their editors or their acquisitions editors just don't care. But anyways, so back to this book. I hated, like I said, I hated everything about it. The writing is awful. I read this around the time when I was doing a, an editing kind of crash course with a longtime friend and editor of mine, and as I was reading it, I found so many things that I had a problem with that my editor helped me with, like vague antecedents, dangling modifiers, dangling participles, so much stuff in here that just makes the writing bad. But let's forget all about the writing. Let's completely ignore the writing and talk about the story. So spoilers from here on out. For some odd reason, this guy kidnaps these two kids and he ends up killing one of them on accident. But instead of just hiding the body or burying the body, he tosses the body in the river. This guy is supposed to be genius IQ level intelligence, and he ends up dumping the body instead of just burying the body on a property. I think it was around a barn or whatever. So there was a place for him to hide the body. But he just decides to dump it in a river, which ends up getting found, which starts the whole tumbling down of him getting in trouble. There is also a section where he goes to jail. He just makes it so he does go to jail, because I think he holds up a McDonald's or something along those lines, which is completely different from the movie version. He ends up in jail and he is able to escape from jail for the craziest. There's no cameras on the elevator. There's nothing stopping him from walking out of this prison because he ends up over, I can't remember if he was, if he had paid the guard, but just one guard got him out of this prison. Now while that might be a possibility, I'm not sure. I can't remember exactly how it goes. And also, I'll leave my review, my written review, from right after I finished reading it. Huge, huge warning for vulgarity, because I was mad, and it's a rage review, so expect some very colorful language. So he gets out of prison with no problem. I guess the thing that I had a problem with, I know it had to do with cameras in the elevator, there was coincidence. Like how in the hell did he just happen to be riding down the elevator with this certain guard or something to that effect. The next thing that I will bring up is the point where I started to get upset and angry at how bad this book was. Now this guy has the FBI, the local police. He has everybody watching out for him. So much so that they have a, what is it, a stakeout going, watching his house after he breaks out of jail. He has people watching his house and watching these other people also. And he gets by them in either a FedEx or a UPS driver outfit. So mind you, there, the federal government is watching these houses and he is just able to come and go because he dressed up like a mail delivery service. It is so terribly bad. And I go back and I look at the reviews for this book and I see some of my, some very, very intelligent people giving this book five stars. And while I understand the idea of escapism, there's just so many, so many holes and problems with this book. Beside that, there are a lot of really terrific writers who gave this book five stars and I, like I said, I just, I don't understand it. James Patterson has become kind of a meme at the level that he's at with, you know, he doesn't even write anymore. He hasn't written in, you know, probably a decade or more and he's teaching writing classes. He wasn't a very good author to begin with and he's teaching writing classes. So all these things come together. And yes, it's made this retro of you a little bit of a more of an explanation to why I dislike James Patterson. But this is the reason this book right here is the reason why I dislike James Patterson. So to everybody who says, yeah, he used to be a good writer. No, no, honey. No, he didn't. I mean, the thing is, you can argue about what's good writing and what's bad writing all day long. Objectively, he's a bad writer because he doesn't follow grammar rules. I mean, that's, that's basic. That's an objective, that's an objective state. An objective find is to say that he does not follow normal grammar rules. So objectively, he's bad and subjectively, he's terrible also. But anyways, what do you think about James Patterson? Go ahead and tell me down there in the doobly-doo. I'm sure some of his wonderful, wonderful fans will stop by to tell me how terrible I am. But I especially like to know why you like him. Do you completely ignore the bad writing? Do you completely ignore the plot holes? What is it? Is it because he has short chapters? Let me know down there in the comments below. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another retro review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye. If this is anything like Goodreads, the comment section is just going to turn into a pit full of feces and nuclear waste materials. There are two types of fandoms out there that are just the ugliest, ugliest commenters on the face of this plan. That's Dean Coons fans. Go check out the comment section over for my top 10 Dean Coons books, I think it is. And then go check out any of my James Patterson reviews. Just utter garbage, garbage people. It's funny because when I talk bad about Stephen King, like I'll say, okay, Wizard and Glass is his worst book, I might get so many go, you're an idiot. But I never have anybody say the vile shit that they do on the Patterson and the Coons books. And I'm wondering if it's because his fans aren't of a certain intelligence level. You know what I mean?