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invasion of the apple pickers

Évalué le: 2023-10-28

Dan Paxton lives with his daughter Calla in the small town of Harrow, and he's pretty sure he's going to have to tell his daughter that he can't pay for her college because his desperate attempt to graft the perfect apple ever has failed, that is until his 7 trees suddenly sprout apples; delicious, red, dripping apples. Soon after eating them the townspeople start to notice old injuries have faded, they've become stronger and faster, and better. Meanwhile there's a whole whack-load of other characters. Calla's annoying friends who feel like they stumbled out of <i>Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.</i> Joanie, who runs some kind of BDSM themed house rental. Meg and Emily, a married couple moving back to Meg's hometown after Emily cheated. John, an indigenous apple hunter who's former best friend died in Harrow while seeking an apple a few years back.

There are things I liked about this. A few at least. I liked the slow-build in which one of the characters turns out to be the villain, however I found them incredibly boring after their turn was complete, which seems contrary to the implication that the apple merely allowed the darkness within to be freed. In general the apple was inconsistent. Some characters when they go to eat it are so revolted by it that they spit it out. John calls this being rejected by the apple, which was how I interpreted it. But later it is revealed that everyone can tell the apple is evil and they just had the willpower to reject it. The problem is that we saw their point of view when they spat out the apple and it did not feel like that at all, but rather that they were, again, being rejected by it.

This was supposed to be stuff I liked.

I liked John. It was interesting to read about apple hunters. And it's nice to have both a quacker and someone uninterested in relationships or sex in a story. And his stoic nature made him so much less annoying than, well, everyone else. The others were infuriating.

The writing here ranges from passable to terrible, with a really bad habit of assuming the reader is an idiot and explaining things to them in great detail that were already perfectly implied. He utilizes a lot of conventions that feel to me like they mostly exist for the sake of visual story telling, like having John constantly visited by his deceased former friend when this is a book, you can just tell us John's thoughts. You don't have to invent a conceit to have him say them. The rest of the dialogue just screamed of "guy in his late forties tries to write women". I'm not even saying that he objectified them, but Emily, Joanie, and Calla all felt particularly inauthentic in a way that was really grating. They also all could be summed up with their identity which then continues to be all that's interesting about them and all they really talk about. Calla wants to be an social media influencer, Emily is a carefree lesbian, and Joanie likes BDSM and is in an open relationship. And now you know as much about them as I do after reading 600+ pages. This isn't "wokeness". It's bad writing.

All of these problems with the story would be diminished if the horror was good. It's not. I really struggled to figure out the tone, whether I was supposed to take any of this seriously. But the book deals with it's evil apples with a deathly seriousness. You can make ordinary things scary, but I never felt frightened or revolted by the apples. The rules seemed both too clear and unclear. The villains were supposed to have always been bad and also be victims in a way that didn't make fit for me. And then we got to the Orchard Tenders. To be clear Orchard Tender is a great monster name, but it's hard to make "apple seeds for teeth" sound scary no matter how many times you say it.

I think the evil apple needs to be more of a temptation thing, which this played with but never clearly. A lack of clear purpose is probably the main problem here.

One star may be unfair. A part of me feels that any book that manages to get me to finish 600 pages deserves at least 2, but throughout those 600 pages I mostly read on because I wanted to finish it, not because I was immersed or excited by it. Rather than terror, this mostly only annoyed me.

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