Book Review: The Kid Dies by Haji Outlaw

The Kid Dies by Haji Outlaw was free for the kindle edition and I grabbed it. The book's description looked interesting, from amazon, "This superb work of dark fiction, in the vein of Chuck Palahniuk and Cormac McCarthy, finds a female assassin with five kills remaining in order to exit her life of murder." Wooo... I liked Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. It's one of my top five favorite movies of all time. I even bought an autographed copy of the book because I loved it. And while I didn't LOVE The Road by Cormac McCarthy he's got a name like a Scottish barbarian so he's probably better than I think... his book's just too depressing though. If I want bleak I'll look out the window. Iowa winter's aren't known for their unbleakness (which is, evidently, not a real word).

On my kindle the book shows how far along I am in the book in percentages. I was late back from break. I was almost late back from lunch. I got an app for my phone so I could read later into the night without it hurting my eyes so I could read this book late. Great book for 96% of the book.

It had two amazing characters who could have whole series' written about them. A smart, talented, capable, attractive female assassin named Freya Simone. I loved her. She's like an anti-James Bond. So, great. Really liked her bits.

In the other story line was an 8 year old um... he's imprisoned in a prison for psychopathic criminals or something along those lines. He's described as completely without empathy, killed his own mother while he was being born; kills a fellow inmate/patient while the staff talks about how bad he is. Evidently he's also got psychic powers and they're really well written, well done. I liked it a lot. I liked HIM a lot as a bad guy though. He's not a bad guy we'd normally expect. 8 year old kid? Not your typical baddie. Cool twist. Sociopathic 8 year old with unstoppable mental powers? Muahahaha... bad news.

Then there was 2% of transition where I was um... not sure where things were going with the book and then the final 2% of the book happened and I realized the author had accidentally ended the wrong book. The whole book had built to something and it happened then there was an epilogue part of the book, a part like in the movie The Piano after the piano is pushed into the lake, stop watching there!!! Or Pay it Forward, you'll know where to end it. Don't keep watching! It's stupid! Well, this is the same way. After the scorpion goes down to the sand to do what scorpions do... STOP READING. Everything that comes after that goes back in time and retroactively wrecked the book for me because the story was retconned and warped and turned into a Bob Newhart "it's all a dream" kind of thing, no, it's not all a dream... it's just the ending was such a complete non-sequitur. Stop at the scorpion doing what scorpions do, seriously. Up to that part it's a GREAT book... after that... well, if you keep going don't blame me... seriously, he ended it weirdly... and it didn't add to the story or the book or the characters. It subtracted from all of those things.