Bad Glass by Richard Gropp

★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

[caption id="attachment_831" align="alignright" width="200"] Bad Glass by Richard Gropp (Advanced Review Copy provided by Netgalley)[/caption]

(Note: This reviews is based on an ARC provided by NetGalley)

I’m speechless – and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. Richard Gropp’s Bad Glass was...something. It was repugnantly addictive, but it lacked all the other attributes that make a good book. The characters were flat, boring and unlikable. The plot – I think it was a plot – was bland, uninteresting and, in the end, muddled.

And yet the appalling, grotesque imagery painted by Gropp made me unable to put it down.

Part of the reason I chose this book was because it took place in Spokane, Washington – also known as “Spokcompton” by many of us residents of eastern Washington State. It’s not a particularly interesting place to begin with, so Gropp really had a blank canvas.

The book can really be summed up in three words: Weird $h!t happens, but here’s the extended version:

Dean, a (presumably) rich kid from California, cashes his dad’s tuition check and sets off to Spokane to prove himself as a photographer. He sees an opportunity in Spokane, which is under quarantine and military lockdown. Rumors have circulated about unexplainable phenomenon occurring within the city – which became more believable when, during a live televised press conference, the mayor vanished into thin air.

After sneaking into the city, Dean finds unspeakable horrors – bodies merging into walls, animals with human limbs. He takes up residence with a group of “survivors” – people who chose not to evacuate – and becomes smitten with their emotionally damaged leader, Taylor. While photographing his “evidence,” Dean is drawn into the dysfunctional group and his mission begins to extend beyond his camera lens.

Bad Glass seemed unable to make up its mind whether it wanted to be an action/adventure plot or a psychological thriller.

Dean becomes uninterested in proving himself as a photographer early on, but he keeps taking pictures. The group seems superficially interested in finding out what is causing all the phenomena, but not enough to investigate. They seem content with staying in the house, getting high and drunk – and I think that goes to say a lot about the reasons why they stayed. They all give weak excuses (Amanda says she stayed because she lost her dog), but I think it may have more to do with the fact they didn’t have anything better going on in their lives.

And that’s how I began to feel about this book half way through: it wasn’t going anywhere.

Exploring the psychology of the characters could’ve made for a mind-trip of a plot. Learning more about their thoughts and emotions and then integrating it into how the phenomenon played on that would’ve been interesting. Instead, the book was filled with random events – all of which could’ve segewayed into an awesome climax – that were quickly abandoned and added nothing to the plot.

Now that I’ve thoroughly addressed the misses, here’s what I liked:

The imagery is fantastic. Gropp did an excellent job at describing the indescribable. The grotesque scenes that shouldn’t be happening were disturbingly believable and each one seemed more fantastic than the last. Gropp’s unbridled creativity in inventing these abominations of nature had no limits. And it kept me reading.