Cheap Afterburn (Book) (Colin Harrison) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Afterburn

Depressingly Brilliant
As a (thus far) unpublished writer of thrillers myself, I found this book - my first by Colin Harrison - depressing...because it is just so damned well written. The sheer artistry and depth of Harrison's writing is compellingly good. So good, in fact, that, after reading "Afterburn" I almost felt like abandoning my own aspirations to professional writing. His style and prose transcend the thriller genre, rendering this book a novel in the classic sense. The characters are drawn into, rather than from, life, and it is difficult to resist momentarily identifying with most (not all!) of them and all their ignoble and nasty traits, as Harrison crafts this tale of greed, guts and intrigue. And a tense and gripping, if at times harrowing, tale it is; the best I have read for a long time. Disturbing, too, for its realism. I am a law enforcement veteran of nearly forty years; I have have been "on the streets" in two continents, and yet the clinical calousness of "Morris" in the way he tortures his subjects with surgical precision left me feeling queasy and, yes, a little unnerved. You see, I know such people really exist out there. In "Afterburn", Colin Harrison has captured a slice of underworld life in a literary jar. Read it!

---

Sex and Violence
Colin Harrison is a talented writer. Bodies Electric and particularly Manhattan Nocturne are smart, sharp thrillers, spiky and resonant.

Much of Afterburn is well-written, yet somehow it is kind of a dreadful book. The much-discussed-in-this-space sex and violence weren't the problems for me -- I thought the sex scenes were fun and the violence genuinely harrowing -- hey, it's a thriller. In a better conceived story they would have helped, not hurt, the narrative.

But when you turn the final page, there's little else to remember: the "climax" basically consists of endless pages of description of a random number scheme, the book ends with a thud, and you realize there's been precious little story involved, even from the outset.

In some misguided quest for realism or spasm of self-indulgence, the author seems to have forgotten that he's writing a pulp thriller. How do we know this? He's got pulp characters, pulp situations, pulp dialogue. Pulp sex and violence. Good ones, at that. But he has no story to give them shape and resonance, just a long, long, set-up and then a depressingly random series of events that conspire against (almost) everyone. And every bit of it, from Vietnam to prison to Manhattan to the above-mentioned number scheme, eventually becomes alarmingly over-detailed. Many self-conscious Dickens references don't make for a Dickens novel.

Yes, you can abandon story in literary fiction, but in pulp, no matter how well-wrought, without it all you have left is, well, sex and violence.

---

A pile of sadistic tripe
This book does for literature what fecal matter does for holiday dinner. In a wandering, hollow story Harrison writes of a main character who has none, a series of events that are pointless, and a sick focus on over-described torture. All books are supposed to enlighten you about some aspect of life and Mr. Harrison certainly has with Afterburn -- I'll never read another book he writes. Ever.