Lobstergirl's Reviews > Destroyer Angel

More godawful prose from one of the worst thriller writers. I'd put her at the bottom, except the field is very competitive. Barr is one of those writers who gets worse, not better, the more novels she churns out.

Her ornery refusal to use pronouns continues. "Muscles would not bunch. Fingers would not bend and claw."

Tears threatened.
Fingers shook.
Eyesight dimmed.
Feet worked.
Knees bent.
Hip joints rotated.
Light helped.
Vision grayed out.

She has a tendency to repeat sentence patterns. Here's the worst example - an entire paragraph without letup. Her editor should catch things like this.

Jimmy's coat protecting Anna's rump from the wet ground, her lap protecting Wily, they made themselves comfortable in a stand of oaks ringed with wild-rose bushes and bracken. Hunkered down to prey, the two waited with the patience of wild animals. Putting her hands under the nylon rain cape she'd made Wily, she let his fur warm her fingers. Head back against the bole of the tree, she listened to the progress of the men gathering firewood. Ears and nose being of superior quality, Wily closed his eyes and rested his chin on Anna's forearm.

There are horrible, cringeworthy, bullshitty sentences like:

Wily was warm and the fire was warm and Anna was as the fire and the dog and the boulder, cured of the burden of what the poets and the preachers called soul.

Don't try to write above your weight class. Thriller readers don't want sentences like that. Please. Stop.

Please stop creating horrible new verbs, like "crabbed" for moved like a crab and "skinned out" for removed a piece of clothing. These ghastly locutions are used multiple times. Please give these words a break: muscles, bones, skull, belly. These words appear dozens of times in her last few books. Are you afraid people won't think you're a poet if you use the words head and stomach? Please, get a clue: no one thinks you're a poet and never will.

Stop writing sentences like: "Their muscles and bones were gentled with fading childhood and oncoming fertility."

Please.

The plot: women and underage girls being tortured in the woods. There's been a lot of increased grotesquerie in Barr's recent novels. It's almost like she's getting some sadistic thrill out of it. Yes, the men, the killers and rapists and predators always lose in the end, but boy do the women have to go through a lot of physical abuse to get to that point.