I wonder if Spacey read this before the film. (K-Pax - Gene Brewer)

Member Name: MartynColebrook

Product:	K-Pax - Gene Brewer
Date:	21/04/02 (205 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Short

Disadvantages: Not short enough

K-Pax is, in all honesty, one of the worst books I have read. I don't just mean worst in terms of pulp-fiction, in this case it is simply the Gene Brewer's inability to write in a style that will engage with his audience. Sadly he has chosen to write a sequel to it which probably means another printer somewhere has to waste their precious ink in producing what will most likely be another 200 pages of egotistical, indoctrinating drivel. Amazingly, this book has made it as a high-profile film starring Kevin Spacey, in this case I hope the director murders the story line and comes up with something interesting.

K-Pax is a novel based on a series of interviews in a psychiatric hospital with a patient calling himself 'prot' who claims to come from the planet K-Pax. Personally I wish he had stayed there. As the interviews progress it becomes more and more apparent that 'prot' is a mentally disturbed individual who suffers from either a multiple identity or is suppressing something horrendous that has occurred in the past. In the course of these interviews, the author bullies, patronises and tries to trick the subject into revealing his true character whilst lulling the audience into the false belief that something worthwhile may be about to happen in the end. As it happens there is not so much a happy ending as an uncertain finale to this novel, more of a relief than anything else but we are still left with the continuous moralising and social comment that is made even more irritating when it is surrounded by another 210 sheets of trashy, badly thought out, inadequately expressed writing.

I'm guessing that the writer intended this to be some sort of satire since if there was a serious moral point lurking in the depths of his writing then he either forgot all about it and replaced it with some Freudian psychology for good measure or I'd given up with it by that time. Unfortunately this is the type of book that someone is ei
ther going to love or hate and I suspect I may be in the minority of those who didn't like it. I received this book free as part of a book-shop offer and I'm surprised they didn't pay those who took it up to remove it from their bookshelves as there is no way it would have sold otherwise. Avoid this at all costs, I don't intend to even contemplate how bad the sequel is, it was horrendous enough wasting 2hrs 30mins of my existence reading the first.

Summary: