Done it before, probably do it again

Well, I picked up another weak thriller at the library. Black Monday has an interesting premise. Some nefarious force has released a plague which destroys oil products, so cars stop working, planes fall from the sky and so on. Like the incredibly silly Natural Selection before it, this one has annoying characters.

As often found in such works, the hero is all too powerful (these people need to look at the amateurs in peril in Alan Furst's books). He is smart, wise and capable of anything. He is also a great big sweetie who adopted kids from Sao Paulo slums and Sudan. And he and his wife play this game while having sex. Whoever achieves the petit mort (as the French say) first, makes dinner the next night. Something tells me brotherman cooks a lot of meals.

My principal complaint is that there is just not enough carnage. If the world is crashing down, we need more crashing and less focus on a wicked assassin sent to derail the government's attempts to save the day. This is less a complaint of the book then of the genre of save-the-world-books.

I much prefer end-of-the-world books to save-the-world ones. For one, we get lots more carnage. For another, we get less unrealistic characters. And in end of the world books the focus is on survival and/or facing Kobayashi Maru scenarios. Which is more interesting than reading about second rate Jack Bauers.

One of the older, but still excellent depictions of the end of the world is Lucifer's Hammer, which tells the tale of a comet crashing into the Earth with resultant destruction. Jack McDevitt normally writes Asimov-esque tales of future archaeology, but he also wrote Moonfall, in which a comet hits the Moon and some of the debris gives the Earth a bad time.

Anyway, I keep picking up trashy thrillers in case I find a really good one. Sometimes I actually do.