Sunday, September 6, 2015

Simon R. Green's 3rd installment of the Ghost Finders series is the last I'm willing to read.

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If you've read the first two books in the Ghost Finders series, you'll know that Melody has an unhealthy attachment to her machinery, Happy hates his job and just wants to hide away at home, and JC has an ego the size of Big Ben and an obsession with a ghost woman, Kim.  After reading the third book, "Ghost of a Dream," you'll find that none of this has changed, and none of the characters see any problems with this.


After getting to know the characters in the first couple of books, one would expect to see some evolution in their behavior or desires.  Maybe Happy isn't as dependent on his chemical helpers as he used to be, but that's only because he switched to using sex as a coping mechanism.  That's not character development, just a character with an established trait of avoiding emotions taking advantage of a newly offered method of avoidance.


Even the stories the team of ghost finders has to unravel is nothing new.  Following the form established in the first two books, the finders have two cases before them.  Both hauntings have all the cliché signs of ghost activities: cold spots, doors opening and shutting on their own, bodiless voices, hallucinations, spatial distortions, and people who appear to be living but are actually ghosts.  You could have pulled the descriptions from any book of hauntings on the planet.  But the fact that it's only clichés isn't my biggest issue, but how many clichés are at each haunting sight.  Why not pick a couple for each place and focus on those?  Why do we have to have every trick in the book at each haunting sight?  It's just too much of the same thing over and over again.


The cases are even solved in the same ways over and over again - the same as they were in books one and two: JC sees through the illusions the ghosts are throwing at them and laughs it off; he steals the power of the things going bump in the night by treating them like they're insignificant.  Maybe this is the author's intention with his Ghost Finders series - to show that ghosts are nothing to be afraid of and only have the power we allow them to have.  But surely there are better ways of saying this same line over and over again than having JC literally say the same line at least twice in every book.


The opening page of "Ghost of a Dream" had some remarkably profound thoughts on the nature the passage of time, and how mere thought can keep the past alive.  It inspired me to want to read this book, despite my misgivings from the first two in the series.  However, that beautiful writing Simon R. Green has proven to be capable of was only a teaser in this book.  His poetry and philosophy was quickly replaced with Happy begging to go home and Melody telling everyone to shut up so she could look at her screens, while JC surveyed the situation with a smug smile.  It makes me a little sad, knowing that the Green could do so much more with these characters than he seems willing to do.  Perhaps it's time to see what else Green has put out there, and let the Ghost Finders find their way to the back of my bookshelf.

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