Bats

The time has come to read William W. Johnstone’s Bats, an epic novel about… ok, you know what it’s abbout. It starts with the main character being a wanted badass who effortlessly killed a group of terrorists. Then come the BATS. See, evil superbats end up in Louisiana. That’s basically the book.

This is a William W. Johnstone book, which means it has pretentions of being ‘epic’ while having a complete inability to actually do so, a hatred of the media that makes even me defend them, and an inability to stick with its nominal subject matter. It’s fitting that I listened to GG Allin while writing this review, for he was to music what Johnstone was to authorship.

So we get about a 10-1 ratio of non-bat to bat scenes. We get devil worshipers (a favorite Johnstone horror villains) starting a rabies chain reaction among other animals. Then comes more conference room scenes than a post-1991 Tom Clancy novel. Then in the same military logistics skill that Johnstone demonstrated in the Ashes Series, a squadron of A-6 Intruders is informally acquired to firebomb the bats and then leaves. Finally the bats are dealt with via a device so lame and contrived that it rivals the end of the Jaws novel in terms of anticlimax. Hint: Imagine if the shark was attacked by a punch of gobies and barracudas and killed in front of Brody.

Well, at least I know now that Johnstone was as bad a horror writer as he was a thriller writer.