Robert Johnson (21)

The Culling by Robert Johnson had all the earmarks of a great novel choice for me.
Deals with a plague/virus/outbreak - check
Main characters work for the CDC - check
Action packed and includes sound scientific facts - check
A team is exhuming the graves of flu victims in Alaska - check
Sadly, despite all it had going for it, The Culling needed culling for me - a so-so novel

In The Culling by Robert Johnson 27 year old Dr. Carl Sims is a buff doctor with the CDC who aspires to work with the lethal Biosafety Level 4 viruses (Ebola and Marburg) but is still in level 2. His lover and fellow CDC employee, Dr. Angela Varella (28) tries to tell him to tell him that this is because every other virologist at the CDC has more seniority than he does, but he resents this fact. Angela leaves the CDC for a job with an evil pharmaceutical company while Carl is called off to assist Dr. Jenna Williams in Guangdong Province, China, where there is a reported outbreak of influenza.

What Carl doesn't know is that his being requested by Jenna Williams to assist her is not a coincidence. Jenna knew Carl's father who headed the world wide campaign to encourage people to just have two children in order to stop global overpopulation. Soon Carl's an unwitting part of a global conspiracy. He must untangle the facts before he succumbs to what he is trying to stop.

My problem with The Culling by Robert Johnson is on two levels.

First all the characters are unsympathetic. Carl is annoying. His friend, Dr. Stuart Chew is even more annoying. Dr. Jenna Williams and Dr. Angela Varella are annoying. And they do very foolish things by "accident" that I simply can't accept. By the time we get to the culling conspiracy I'm sort of secretly leaning toward supporting it.

All the overpopulation information Johnson includes at the opening are well-known facts for me, known for many, many years. My lifetime also includes a period of time when lots of scientific facts for a new ice age were also being released (naturally this predates the current global warming facts). Maybe, just maybe, Johnson needs to look at a wider picture in order to have a better idea how complicated the overpopulation issues are, beyond simply only having two children. (For the record - 2 children.) It does not help the novel that we know early on that Carl accidentally impregnated Angela.

I can't help but feel that this novel has been written before in variety of different ways that were all more successful as novels. By the end the message I though Johnson was trying to convey felt muddled and incomplete. It's not that it is bad; it just isn't as good as it could be.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of The Permanent Press for review purposes.




… (plus d'informations)

When I read the description for this book I was really excited to get my hands on it because I absolutely love apocalyptic type books. Sadly I was disappointed by this book and cannot really recommend it. While the premise of the book was promising, the delivery failed. There was not one character with whom I bonded because none of them were really fleshed out enough for me to understand them. In addition, I don’t mind when an author present “preachy” material if the story itself is good but The Culling simply did not do it for me.

I know that there are likely plenty of people who enjoyed it and who would give this book a glowing review but my own take on it is that I would pass on other books by this author.… (plus d'informations)

I signed up for this book on Early Reviewers because, being honest, I agree with the idea of culling humanity in principle. I think we're overpopulated and that overpopulation is the root cause of most of our current social and economic problems: basically, I think we can achieve better living through fewer people. I believe that the death rate is too low, there are about 200% more people in my country and the world than there ought to be, and increasing people's mortality and reducing our life expectancy is a more effective and moral solution than reducing birth rates. So, basically, I expected to be rooting for the conspirators the blurb promised me to succeed and for Carl to decide to aid them.

Instead, more than anything else I was rooting for the editor to cull Mr. Johnson's words. I felt like he was trying to show off his vocabulary and his ability to write baroque sentence structures, and I did not enjoy that one bit. Above all else, I turned against the narrator a few pages in after yet another conditional sentence (in the present tense, no less) too many. I can't remember reading any book before that I'd describe as having a "third person uncertain" narrator, but Johnson made so much use of "probably" and "seems" and "maybe" and "perhaps" in his narration that I'm very certain I don't ever want to read another.… (plus d'informations)