A measure of anxiety
I’m browsing around the tubes this night, trying to think of something to post for the day, when lo and behold, I find an ad for this:
Another book by Tom Clancy, apparently a sequel to The Teeth of the Tiger. I must admit a measure of anxiety over the news, given his last two entries. Red Rabbit seemed like a rewrite of The Hunt for Red October that was twice as long, and The Teeth of the Tiger seemed to be a prematurely released reboot of his franchise. He has a habit of writing more than he needs to, much like Ayn Rand, but at least Clancy keeps you interested. With Rand it is all a sense of when will she stop talking about the frickin contradictions, I GET IT, THEY DON’T EXIST, where with Clancy it is where is he going with this. At least with Clancy you (eventually) get an answer to the question, why did he just write that?
I’ll get a copy and read all 848 pages of it, just for the sake of completion. I have a complete set of Clancy first edition hardbacks, so there’s no need to make the set incomplete by not buying a copy. I will hope that his decade vacation from the pen has done his storywriting some good, but the byline (Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood) makes me more uneasy, not less.