Ulff Lehmann's Reviews > Paternus

I read an amazing movie, but a novel, in my opinion, it was not.

Dyrk Ashton's Paternus is a curious thing. The entire concept is mind-boggling, but its execution leaves me wishing for a more "conventional" book.

Don't get me wrong, I love the story! I just dislike its execution.

What is it about? Imagine every myth has a kernel of truth, but not in a religious kind of way, everything science knows is correct, but key events are missing due to the fact that no human knows about them. Until now, or then, or sometime maybe today but it could also be tomorrow. We got the teenage protagonist and her love interest, we got bad guys and not so bad guys, and we got a truckload of secrets the protagonist and her beau discover over the course of 24 hours.

I love Ashton's ideas, the concept is incredible, prepare for the big and wholly subjective but.

But it is written like a screenplay, or a comic book. The majority of its parts are written in present tense, with no truly distinctive separation in points of view. I can handle the tense, but having perspective shift without so much of a paragraph separator was beyond annoying.

Ashton worked in Hollywood, and I understand the differing conventions between novel and screenplay, but we readers aren't potential directors or actors, usually. We don't need info dumps that help define characters but do very little to the story, other than tossing a wrench into the story's momentum. Switching from screenwriter to novelist and vice versa is tough. Sure, both are typed out stories, though one relies more on other sources to provide the visuals while the other is limited by the very nature of that there never will be massive ILM special effects displayed on the pages.

To me this is the greatest drawback of the novel. Paternus is a good movie to read, but a novel it is not. At least to me.

Will I read the sequel? Hells, yeah!