 Hello everybody! E here. Welcome back to another Book Review. Today, we are talking about a book that has been not requested, been recommended to me by dozens of people over the years ever since it came out. Let me see when it came out. It seems like it's been just mentioned over and over again, especially during Halloween. Let's see here. This one came out. Oh, it's only 2016, so it hasn't been that long. But yeah, so the last days of Jack Sparks, excuse me, my nose is driving me nuts today. I don't know what it is, something in the air, seasonal change, something like that. I don't know. But anyways, the last days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnott. I'm going to go ahead and get the bad stuff out of the way first because there's a lot of it, and then we'll talk about the good stuff. So right off the bat, this book is written in the first person point of view of one of the biggest douchebags I've ever read. I'm a fan of reading about characters that I don't like, characters that may be morally ambiguous, they might be terrible people. You, well, not you, you rock, but you by Caroline Kepnes, fashion victim by Amin Ahtar, and our kind of cruelty by Ereminta Hall. The list goes on and on. I like reading about bad people doing bad things. The problem here is this is a first person POV from one of the biggest douchebags I've ever come across in literature, and it just, the scares, for the first, I would say 200 pages just weren't enough there for me to care. The book ends up being a weird mishmash of Doctor Who, let's see here, Doctor Who, oddly enough, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and The Exorcist all rolled into one. That's the best way I can describe it. It's a good, it's a good book. It's an okay book. It's much better in my opinion, well you guys know I don't like it anyway, but Headful of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay, and the reason why it's so much better, I wish this one had gotten more, even though I don't love this one, I'm going to give it three stars. I really wish this one would have gotten more attention and more credit than Tremblay's because he, I think Arnaud does a much better job reinvigorating either the genre, the possession story, the exorcism story, it's just a much better written piece of work. In that it's more entertaining. He uses modern technology and stuff like that in a believable sense. I believe, you know, everything, and one of the things that helped with this is the fact that our main character is a douchebag. I didn't like reading about it. I did not like reading about this particular man. I don't know why, because like I said, I love reading about terrible people doing terrible things, especially if there's some comeuppance at the end. Jack Sparks, well not supposedly, Jack Sparks dies in this book. It's on, it's literally on the, it says Jack Sparks died while writing this book, so it's not a spoiler. It's the whole plot of the story, really. So the book opens up and we find Jack at an exorcism, and the only thing I'm going to say about that is he laughs. It kind of sets the whole book into motion. He laughs because he thinks it's fake. He starts making, well I don't think he, I don't remember that he starts making fun of it, but that's really where the book starts. Pretty much the rest of the book revolves around him trying to disprove the supernatural after basically seeing something that had to have been supernatural. I guess it didn't have to, but in this one there's a lot of BS from this dude trying to convince himself that there isn't supernatural stuff going on, and that got old and tiring. The repetition of him just denying stuff that couldn't possibly be anything else. The him coming up with these elaborate leaps of logic, as an atheist myself, the character is atheist, as an atheist myself, I've never been that adamant about disbelieving. I would love to find some kind of special, other world, some supernatural, whatever. I'd love to find out having it real or whatever it may be, but up until that point logically I can't agree with that. But this character seems like one of those militant atheists, and I don't care too much for that, and I don't care too much for the idea toward the end feels like all atheists are closed minded. There was the message there at the end. I thought that was odd. It seemed to really harp on that toward the end, especially when I guess he couldn't see past himself, which is kind of my feelings on religion. People who believe in religion refuse to see facts. This character refusing to see facts, even as an atheist, that just felt like an odd, not odd, but it felt like contradictory there. And I guess that was one of the things, they're trying to make him hypocrite, trying to make, not there, but Jason Arnaub is trying to make him as bad as possible. So do I think that it was author intrusion? I don't think so, but it seemed like in the book it focused on that aspect. Not too much, it just seemed like it focused on that, and I didn't care too much for it. I don't think that the character was portrayed well enough, even given his backstory. I hope all that stuff makes sense. I almost quit this around page 200 or so, I think that's when it was because someone out there told me that he dies halfway through the book and then his brother comes on and tells the rest of the story. I don't know who you are, but you lied to me. And I was expecting that, so I'm sitting there the whole time, I got my hopes up, and I started hating the book because of that. I want this dude to die because he is such a terrible person. I want this dude to die, and then it seemed like they were going to go down this redemption arc for him, and that also got me the point, I don't want to read this. This isn't the book I signed up for. And then there came this huge 30, 40 page scene of utter brilliance. It didn't really turn around the whole book for me, I'm still only giving it 3 stars. But it certainly jacked it up from a 1 all the way to a 3, 3.5 stars. If it wasn't for the repetition of twists, at the end I don't know what the deal is with every single book coming out nowadays having to have 4 or 5 different twists instead of just one big kick in the stomach, or two kicks in the stomach. This one just seemed like it just went on with, oh yeah, by the way, the explanation for this is a twist also, and it's gotten to the point where I was like, you know, the magician has pulled the sheet off of the reveal too many times so far. And that kind of ruined the ending for me. Another thing is the book kind of doesn't know what it wants to be. I don't want to give any spoilers away, but it tries to be one thing and tries to be another thing and tries to be another thing without really narrowing down what it actually is. But there is enough leftover mystery that I did enjoy the speculation of the book, whereas someone like a trim blade doing head full of ghosts, that ending is just a total cop out. He's like, it could be, but it also couldn't be. But it could be, but it also couldn't be. At the end of that book just kind of jumps back and forth. It's like, fool'd you, no I fooled you, no I fooled you, and it just becomes stupidly repetitive. It's not this, it's actually this, but it's not actually this, it's this. And this book didn't really do that. It didn't continuously disprove what was there before, but there were so many threads in the story that he had to tie up, that it, ah my nose, I'm sorry guys, that he, it's like he was jumping through hoops trying to fix everything at the end. Now is the book worth those 40 pages, there's some more stuff in there also. There's one with a shower drain scene that I think was especially epic. But is the book worth those first 200 pages where I just completely despise the dude all the way up to the end? Nothing about that changed. But is it worth kind of torturing yourself to read about this guy? I'm leaning toward yes. I didn't like the book. If you read, let's see here, Sadie's or Mother Horror's review on Goodreads, she gave it four stars, but she fully admits she had the same problems I did with it. Steph over at, that's what, Stephanie over at, that's what she read. Even that review is just four stars and they both say they love the book, but it's both still four star reviews, so there, they see that there's problems with the book. Maybe not problems, but parts that they didn't, you know, entirely love, and I respect that by the way. Maybe who can look at something that they really liked and find problems with it. I really, really respect that. But with this book, I would recommend it just because it does what Head Full of Ghost didn't for me, which was take a exorcism story and do something new with it instead of just rebooting, you know, not William Friedkin, who wrote Blatty, whatever his full name is. Friedkin did the movie, right? But anyways, he, this, well, not this, Jason Arnott did, I feel, what Tremblay failed wholeheartedly at, which was making this believable and actually committing to an idea to, not really a theme, but committing to the story well enough that he's like, I'm going to give you some real horror and try to disturb you. And this actually did it, whereas in the other one, there was so much left open and so much was vague, and then so much that felt like it didn't need to be there. I do think that Arnott did a better job, but I'm sure there's plenty of you guys that are going to disagree with me, and I'd love to hear from you down there in the doobly-doo. If you liked it, let me know why you liked it. If you disliked it, let me know exactly why you disliked it. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another book review, and yes, at 3 o'clock in the morning, I'm exhausted, but I'm trying to get this done, so if I'm not as perky as I usually am, I apologize. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!