Tales of a Shrink

I finished reading A Stroke of Midnight by Laurell K. Hamilton, and I feel as though I owe it to the world to give some kind of a warning.

This is, without a doubt, the worst book I have ever read.

Now, I admit, that I usually do not even attempt to finish reading books that are this terrible. So I can't tell you with authority that this is the worst book that I've ever held in my hands, but I can confidently say that it is the worst book, by far, that I have ever completed.

This book is bad, my friends. But worse, it's bad in a banal way. All of the Meridith Gentry books by this author are "bad"--but all of the others have been somewhat entertaining despite being poorly constructed and disjointed. But this book is completely devoid of any literary device. Theme, foreshadowing, symbolism, irony, tension, denouement--all of them have been banished by Hamilton in this massive work of crap.

In an interesting note, it appears that Hamilton has actually accomplished something difficult, in that she has managed to write 366 pages without a plot. That's right, my friends: Nothing actually happens in this book. The main character goes from room to room and interacts with people, but there is no unifying theme to any of it. Therefore, Hamilton may have actually penned the world's first work of fiction that cannot be called a "story." Perhaps she deserves some kind of prize for that.

To sum up, I will quote a customer review I read of this book on Amazon.com: "Ms. Hamilton has written an awful lot of words to tell about the events in this book." And even though that play on words is almost too clever to waste on describing A Stroke of Midnight, that's exactly my point. The book is an awful, tedious lot of words.