Dan Brown is the new Clive Cussler

[jeriendhal]

 Confession: I used to eat Clive Cussler novels when I was a teenager.  I first got hooked on Raise the Titantic, encouraged by a brief comic serialization of the novel that ran in the Washington Post back when the book first came out.   That led me to A Night to Remember and an attempt to build a Revell model of the ship that my dad ended up completing.

 From there it was a quick romp through Vixen 03 (Biological warfare!  Sunken airplanes!  The USS Iowa going up the Potomac to shell the Lincoln Memorial!), Night Probe! (sunken trains, James Bond, a treaty uniting the USA and Canada!) and the rest.  The plots were ludicrous, the characters weak at best, but god Clive could spin a yarn.  It didn't hurt that he actually knew something about underwater salvage (the sunken train story was real, or rather believed real until he proved it was part of an insurance scam) and could use that thin basis of plausibility to go off into the ether of the fantastic.  My obsession ended upon entering college and trying to plow throughCyclops, which was just turgid, even if it did involve airships and a second Cuban revolution.

Back in his day, Cussler sold in numbers that were, if not in Brown's category, enough to put him consistently on the NYT's bestseller list.  His books were silly and thinly plotted, but they were a lot of fun.

 I think Dan Brown is in the same category now.  No one with half a brain is going to actually believe anything in his books these days.  Just go to any debunking website to see that most of the so called "facts" in his novels he's basically pulling out of his ass.  But he can write a well paced thriller that doesn't strain your brain at all, where the good guys are Good and the bad guys are Bad and there's no mistaking one for the other.  So he sells, while people who love actually well written books with fantastic premises and  three-dimensional characters (Lois McMaster Bujold for one) beat their heads against the wall.

It all makes so much more sense now that I figured that out.

Comments

[secoh.livejournal.com]

i'd agree with that. Cussler annoyed me after a while and I started reading Tom Clancy instead. At least his facts are usually actual facts...