The Last Word, by Taylor Adams

I may be risking my life with this review.

It's a really good idea for a novel. Turn King's Misery on its head and have an obsessed author terrorize a reader. Better yet, in this age of Bookstagram reviewers, an author who takes a bad review to heart and seeks revenge.

It's not that implausible. As a person who's written hundreds of reviews and published a lot by other writers, I've seen writers get irate about a bad review. I've heard accounts of worse than I've experienced. I've even seen them pout about three star reviews!

In The Last Word, a grief-stricken woman is isolated in a seaside house. Speaking of implausible, she has a sort-of relationship with a neighbor strictly through telescopes and handwritten messages. The woman, Emma, finds bitter solace in reading on her Kindle. She runs afoul of a nasty extreme horror book and is disgusted enough to write a harshly negative review. Soon she is fighting for her life against the unhinged indie author, and...maybe something else?

All good. On the positive side, Taylor Adams knows how to write. There are some really nice moments, such as disquieting speculation on the idea of immortality. The butthurt splatterpunk has some original and disturbing habits. I was enjoying the story for the first half, and then...

Aw, you know. Adams began to pile on the twists and preposterous coincidences. The characters seem to die, but are, guess what!, still alive. Time and again.

I would have been much more invested in the story had it been a straight character study of a mentally disturbed indie author and his encounter with a suicidal woman. More depth instead of mind-blowing twists.

Maybe we can't even blame Taylor Adams. Perhaps his editor, who he names in the acknowledgments page, insisted that today's' readers want stupid coincidences, preposterous situations, and cardboard stereotypical characters. Worst of all, she may well have been right.

Written by Mark Sieber