Where the Author Lost Me

Against All Enemies by John Gilstrap
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The longer I read it, the less I liked it, but it was entertaining enough to finish, so I'll give it a 3. Not good enough to read others by this author.

The plot was okay. A bunch of guys, led by a couple disgruntled military men, including one high up in the administration, organize a militia to kickstart a revolution to overthrow a government they see as feckless and corrupt. Training in a hidden corner in the mountains of Appalachia, no one really knows they're there. But connected to their training is some other violence, some assassinations and attempted assassinations, that come to the attention of our off-the-books team, leading them to their compound.

What don't I like? The book's overt politics feel like the author's politics, a feeling that grew as I read, and it gets icky. The Obama-era fictional liberal president is corrupt (imagine the time when conservative SEAL-type dudes cared about government corruption) and he is dismantling the military (always a complaint of the far right). The main character, Jonathan Graves, is committed to supporting the constitution, but he kinda agrees with what this random militia thinks, and he is too sympathetic to their cause. Also, since he is himself a vigilante, outside the law, he doesn't fully condemn what they do or what they want, even though he does take his team up against them. He definitely wishes he didn't have to, and does deep soul-searching afterwards. It felt like the author was conflicted, or thought his audience would be, and was lamp-shading the controversy. I was not sympathetic to this thought process at all.

Less overt but more annoying was the constant bickering and bantering that passes for communication among this crowd. They are always obnoxious to each other and always picking at one another. It's exhausting to listen to the constant ball-busting and bullying and joking insults. They keep showing us what it means to be tough, and basically it means being a jerk. All the time. Whenever someone stands up to them, posturing and talking tough, they admire the guy for having the nerve to oppose them--he's a jerk like me!--and that trope gets tiring really quick.

Additionally, we get intrusive mini-sermons from the characters or the narrator all the time, explaining how to be a tough guy, how to be a real man, how to carry yourself to earn the respect of other tough guys, how to manage a team, how to act in a dangerous situation, and it feels like the author inserting himself, describing the world he wishes we all lived in. (It's a lot like Yellowstone in that way, where we're taught how a real man works and fights and drinks and drives a truck, and although I find that particular aspect of the TV show annoying, I still watched it mostly with pleasure, because it had great conflicts and action. I don't mind if the author has a different world-view than me if he doesn't make it feel too much like his characters are wish-fulfillment.)

In the middle of the action, pretty much between firefights, there's a long pause in the action because one character hesitates when he should have acted, and despite the tension and the danger and the need to get going, the story stops while the characters deal with his failure. They rant about what he needs to say and what he needs to do to make up for his error and what it will take to trust him again. It's like a weird intervention where they confront him and force him to confess his error and explain how he won't do it again. It was--IMO--a creepy scene, and terrible pacing.

The action here is okay, but there was so much weirdness and tough-guy wish-fulfillment that it didn't sit well with me overall. I guess I had been feeling lucky, because I found another author in this genre (a genre I usually don't really like) that I really enjoyed, and thought maybe I was starting to understand it more. That's when I grabbed this book. I guess I was wrong. For now I'll just check out the ones I like when I want an action-thriller like this.

(I might as well name the author: Vince Flynn. Good author. So far I've liked his books.)

Other people loved this, btw. So who knows. But we might have read a different book.

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