 Do you expect me to talk? No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die. Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review today. We're talking about Dean Koons' The House of Thunder. The best part of this book is this bookmark. Look at that bookmark, look at that, that's sexy. This is from A Stranger Dream. If you guys want one, if you wanna grab one, there's a link down there in the doobly-doo. If you use code L-O-R-N, Lauren, that's me. Lauren, five, you get a discount. Go check it out. But anyways, on to the book review. This is a pile of garbage. There's several things we have to unpack, especially why I use the intro that I did to this video. So there's gonna be spoilers. If you're the type of person who gets all ragey about getting spoiled, a book that you wanna read, I understand, please just go on somewhere because there's gonna be spoilers, so I can't talk about this book without spoiling it. So this is a book about a lady named Susan Thornton who supposedly has a car accident, ends up in a coma, and starts running, when she's in the hospital, after she wakes up from the coma, she starts running into the people who killed her boyfriend during a college hazing. The college hazing actually happened. The bullshit with the car accident and all that stuff doesn't. I'm gonna talk about the good part about this book, the only good part about this book that I enjoyed was all the stuff in the fictional town or the made-up town, Willowock. Now all of this stuff happens in Russia because there's a deep government conspiracy plot, all that stuff, because that's a Dean Koons book. You know how Koons does. If there's any kind of weirdness going on, like somebody's dead and they shouldn't be around, they're dead, you know it's a government conspiracy and some kind of government program, cover up bullshit. Dean Koons has done this probably 20, 30 times in his career, we even got the signature sodium vapor streetlights this time around. But the coolest part about this book is the bit toward the end when she's in Willowock and she's going around, when she bumps into the absolutely hilariously named Enid Shipstat. You can't make this shit up. If there is an Enid Shipstat in this world and you're watching this video, I apologize but your name is fucking hilarious. I mean, he's got Dickens beat for the made up names, I think. Anywho, the coolest part is when you get to Enid Shipstat, I can't even say the name without giggling, Enid Shipstat's house and all those children, those programmed robotic zombie children, that was epic. That whole section when she's going through this almost completely, what do you want to call it? Not abandoned but this empty town and there's only certain things here and there and whatnot. That whole chapter was amazing and I loved every single bit of it but it doesn't come anywhere near as close to all the bullshit before it and all the bullshit after it. So all the bullshit before it, the build of the first 270 pages of this book is, and I quote, I don't actually quote, but it's witty dialogue, almost like the Gilmore Girls, quick back and forth, witty dialogue, weather report, there's some kind of thunder, some kind of lightning, some kind of rain. Then there's, which almost made sense at the end but then he fucked himself, they're trying to explain too much. He never did actually explain how the weather was so perfectly on point with everything she was talking about and there's one part where there's thunder outside, there's thunder and there's a storm while the main character, Susan, is talking about the house of thunder, which is a cave with a waterfall and made it sound like it was constant thunder. That was a little too on the nose for me and I laughed way too hard at that. There were so, anyway, so let's go back to the build of this. Then you have the hallucination and her bitching about her hair. So you have, the first 270 pages is some kind of arrangement of witty dialogue, weather report, bitching about her hair being dirty and a hallucination or a hallucination because it's not, none of this is actually hallucination, it's all a government conspiracy. I thought it was hilarious also that these guys, the guys that play harts and quints and all the bad guys always ended up popping up right where she was going next. They were already there waiting on her and I guess there could have been cameras and whatnot in this dude. Like this is like a Keystone cops kind of thing with these guys bouncing around from location to location trying to keep up but there's like a Scooby Doo section where they're running in one door, running in the other door, you know, going back and forth. And then you get to the end and you have the most obvious James Bond ending ever. The bad guys are literally telling her the entire, all they're going to do because they're planning on killing them, of course. The bad guys are like, we're going to do this and we're going to do that. Then we're going to shoot you in the head. Then we're going to throw you over the side of the boat. And of course they escape. Of course they escape. It's just like the ending of every single bond. The bond villain starts monologuing, the Incredibles, the bond villain starts monologuing and they know the whole plan. So now they're equipped to go to, you know, make sure that the bad guys don't win. The level of Cold War nonsense, the paranoia that in this book is amazing. Coates has always been kind of a conspiracy theorist as far as I'm concerned, because all of his books feel like conspiracy theory books. When you get to a certain point, he starts rambling on and on and on, but in this one he goes full bore at the end. Very, very last paragraph of the book. He goes full meta and says the year, now this is not the afterward. This is the very last page break. There's a page break, okay? And then it's still in the narrative. Still in the narrative. We're not in the author's note or anything like that. Still in the narrative, he writes, the year was 1980, an ancient time, so long ago and far away. Hula Jesus. Humanity was divided into armed camps, millions lived in chains, freedom was in jeopardy and a town like Willowock actually existed. But there is a new world order and the human heart has been purified. Oh, and now we have kids in camps. Anyways, has it not? A place like Willowock is impossible now. Evil has been purged from the human soul. Has it not? Come on, Coonsy, what the fuck are you doing, man? Anyways, so, okay. There's so much wrong in this book that there's more to this than just what I have said in this. When I finally get my written review up, it'll go, it'll be linked in this video. And you guys can go click on that and read that. I will try and focus on every single thing that's wrong with this book. But it was so bad, you could feel Coons early on in the book trying his best to make this last as long as possible so he could make it a novel. Another thing is, this was a Lay Nichols book and this is the only one I think, I'm pretty sure, because he did afterwards or whatever, explaining why he rewrote some of these books. And in this one, there is no afterward or forward saying that this is a Lay Nichols book. In fact, it's written in very, very small print. You see this very last line down here? That literally looks like a line of white. That says, previously published under the pseudonym Lay Nichols. Anyways, it's odd, I wonder why he picked this one because this one is just so epically bad. It's not even close to good. Like the only good bits about this book are there in the town. And if it wasn't for the fact that we had those bits in the town, this would probably be, I would probably go ahead and say this is the number one worst Dean Coons book. But there is a highlight there. There is a moment of brilliance with the creepiness that he was able to convey there in the town. So the book is not complete and utter shit. It's just mostly shit. Like you have one little Daisy peaking up out of a huge mound of just fecal matter. And that one Daisy, if he could have figured out a way to pluck that Daisy and to put it in a flower bed where it could shine, or maybe that was the point. If you surround the Daisy with actual shit, the Daisy looks pretty and does not get, you know, get the attention stolen by the tulips and the roses and whatnot. What the fuck am I even talking about? Until next time, I have been Ian, you and you. This has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye. Here at the end, if you read the book, leave a comment down in the doobly-doo. So whatever.