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A review by monty_reads
The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand by Gregory Galloway
2.0
Two stars out of generosity only. It's sort of confounding to see a book that's generally well-written be so awful. If we're to believe the author's note at the end, he wrote this book after experiencing the suicide of several friends and family members, and this book is his attempt explore the psyche of the clinically and chronically depressed. It makes perfect sense, then, that he'd make the title character a suicidal teen who can't die. He flings himself off bridges, shoots himself in the head, drinks himself to death, and always comes back. We don't know why – it's literally never explained – and, to make a dopey premise even worse, everyone in his small town knows about it and just treats it like an annoyance.
So what we get for 300 pages is a thoroughly unlikable character hanging out and drinking with his thoroughly unlikable buddies, flirting with a long-time friend, driving a ten-year-old girl to the doctor, and trying to kill himself. It's told out of sequence, so we don't even really have a narrative to hang on to – it's fragments and impressions, a bunch of vignettes that never add up to anything. It feels like there's something here, like it could be a solid read, but if you're going to write a book that spends much of its time trying to be a quasi-existential meditation on the hopelessness of life – something, by the way, I'm totally on board with – the characters have to be more compelling than what we're given here.
So what we get for 300 pages is a thoroughly unlikable character hanging out and drinking with his thoroughly unlikable buddies, flirting with a long-time friend, driving a ten-year-old girl to the doctor, and trying to kill himself. It's told out of sequence, so we don't even really have a narrative to hang on to – it's fragments and impressions, a bunch of vignettes that never add up to anything. It feels like there's something here, like it could be a solid read, but if you're going to write a book that spends much of its time trying to be a quasi-existential meditation on the hopelessness of life – something, by the way, I'm totally on board with – the characters have to be more compelling than what we're given here.