So, yesterday was the official kick-off of the Keep Portland Weird festival here in Paris, which meant that I had a reading/screening in the...
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I bought this from Powells because it was heavily promoted and came with heavyweight comments on the cover - Steven King et al. It name checks 'No Country for Old Men' on the jacket, and the author thanks Cormac McCarthy in the afterword, but at what point does homage become plagiarism? It follows the same basic plot - drug smuggling deal goes wrong and hitman chases lovable loser who is holding the stash. Kind-hearted sheriff tries to stop the inevitable.
Waite swaps the Mexican border for the Canadian, replaces the desert with the forest, changes the hitman with the bolt gun to an assassin with a set of steak knives, Mexican gangsters for Vietnamese, and pastes verbatim the telephone conversation between the hunter and hunted: 'You know who this is.' He does however change things around by inserting the airport runway shootout from the movie 'Heat'
It's a pity, because Waite is a skilled wordsmith, but really, why didn't he put in a secret Masonic Code and a tattooed computer hacker and cover all his bases?
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The Terror of Living by Urban Waite
skink, April 9, 2011
I bought this from Powells because it was heavily promoted and came with heavyweight comments on the cover - Steven King et al. It name checks 'No Country for Old Men' on the jacket, and the author thanks Cormac McCarthy in the afterword, but at what point does homage become plagiarism? It follows the same basic plot - drug smuggling deal goes wrong and hitman chases lovable loser who is holding the stash. Kind-hearted sheriff tries to stop the inevitable.Waite swaps the Mexican border for the Canadian, replaces the desert with the forest, changes the hitman with the bolt gun to an assassin with a set of steak knives, Mexican gangsters for Vietnamese, and pastes verbatim the telephone conversation between the hunter and hunted: 'You know who this is.' He does however change things around by inserting the airport runway shootout from the movie 'Heat'
It's a pity, because Waite is a skilled wordsmith, but really, why didn't he put in a secret Masonic Code and a tattooed computer hacker and cover all his bases?
(2 of 3 readers found this comment helpful)