My Review of Matthew Reilly

Most people review books or movies. I shall be reviewing books in this one- specifically, the novels of Matthew Reilly, Australian author of logic-defying thrillers. And I’ll be reviewing him as a person too.

Okay, where to start…

PLOT: My main problem with Reilly. His books are mainly plot. And the bad thing is, they’re mainly bad plot. Every thing is non-stop action, which isn’t actually a good thing. Of course, it’s really annoying when nothing happens except the author describing characters eating toast for twenty pages, but Reilly just keeps on putting more and more action on. It has a numbing affect, and takes away from the effect of the action scenes so they stop being “whoa that was awesome I wish I could do that yay!!!” to “meh what’s on TV?”.

Plus, they *really* don’t make any sense. For instance, Reilly wrote a book called Temple, in which the plot revolves around a temple holding a mysterious artifact that is apparenlty the equivalent of four hundred nuclear bombs or something. First our hero Will has to rescue it from a group of armed neo-Nazis- he beats them up and takes it. Then it falls into the hands of the American Army. He beats them up, too. What’s his background? Is he sectretly a ninja? Does he have magic powers? Is he a robot? Nope. He’s a former teacher. Geeze, why doesn’t the United States Government enlist teachers in it’s army instead of soldiers? Apparently they don’t need any training to kick the ass of the most powerful military force on Earth.

Like I said, the mysterious artifact (which is some kind of radioactive idol) is hidden in a temple. Inside the temple are poisonous panthers. Who have apparently hidden there for thousands of years. In a temple without air or food. And they don’t have magic. This is Not Very Well-Thought Out.

But panthers aren’t the least of Reilly’s villains. Take Hell Island, for example. The main villains there are mutant apes who wield knives. Or Ice Fort- radioactive seals. And French people.

Which is another thing. In the novel Scarecrow there is a global conspiracy to kill several figures vital to American security. Who’s behind it? Al-Quaeda? The Communist Party of Russia? A group of neo-Nazis pissed off they didn’t get their idol? Nope. It’s the French.

Those wicked French. Despite being allied to America, being part of NATO and a fellow capitalist democracy, they want to destroy America! And make all the Americans eat snails. Curse them.

CHARACTERS: If you like carboard Gary Stues, you should definitely check out Reilly. All his main characters are the same glorified action hero. Will Race, Professor turned action hero extraordinaire in Temple is pretty much worshipped as a god by a group of South American natives. Scarecrow, the main character or Ice Station, Area 7 and Scarecrow is almost as bad, although he at least has the excuse of being an American soldier (who surprisingly doesn’t get his ass kicked by a teacher). Stephen from Contest has no distinguishing traits at all- he just walks around killing aliens and listening to his annoying alien genius guide thingy.

His characters are, in short, soggy paper cut-outs.

PROSE: Not the greatest in the world, to put it lightly. It’s good that Reilly doesn’t go for pretentious, overblown purple prose. On the downside, he writes like a twelve year old. He has a habit of saying:

This book sucks.

This book sucks!

This book sucks!

to emphasize plot twists and so on. It gets old incredibly fast. Reilly should know that exclamation marks, a little goes a long way.

All in all, I give Reilly E+. He fails life.