Return of the Rogue Readers discussion

Open: April 26th

So, what did everyone think?

I felt it was a bit too romanticized for my taste. A bit long-winded at points as well. It's wasn't horrible in my opinion, but could have been better.

Romanticized how? I agree with the long-windedness. You know me, I become disgruntled when a book starts to drag on. The story of Wool could have been cut by 30-40% without losing any real integrity. Either that or more action needed to happen. The author just took too long to set up the scenes.

Overall, I enjoyed it. I cranked up the speed on my audiobook player and it wasn't so bad. As I read through the book I found myself clicking my tongue at what I felt was lazy writing/research, but some of those things became plot elements later and I retracted my "tisking." What comes to mind is the convoluted nature of the screens, the fake scenery, etc. At first I thought it was a pointless complication, but then as the story unfolded I realized that it was all part of some grand scheme and that I wasn't alone in thinking it didn't make much sense.

Other things were not so easily dismissed, however. I don't know if this was an artistic liberty in the audiobook, but Jahns had a Southern accent. How does one person out of 1000+ end up with a Southern accent? The narrator of the audiobook did a fare job, but some of the voices were grating. Bernard, for example. The voice was so hokey and awful that I almost stopped listening. He sounds like some old-timey cartoon villain. When I mentioned this to Garret he made the joke that you can almost hear him curling the ends of his thin mustache...and that's dead on. I am sure that was the narrators intent, but it was a little much for me.

I would really like to hear the rest of this story. The setting is cool, the characters are a little cliche and weak, but I care enough to want to know more. I am just not sure if I can handle two more books.

As a forewarning, I'm finishing this book by today or tomorrow and only have about 60 pages left. However, I feel for the sake of the current comments, I have some things I would like to add.

I agree with both of you for this novel. To me, I feel like the first four parts, or stories, were written by a different author than this finale of the fifth section, almost as if it was an anthology collection written by different authors within the same universe. The first four were concise, more to the point, and dragged way less. This fifth section will have three chapters scattered about that tell the action of three paragraphs, and they just keep going and going. The best example I can give is when Juliette is going to pump the water from the bottom of the silo and it left the world of being suspenseful and entered the world of being painfully boring.

I also noticed that the beginning and middle of the book held my interest and had a few lines that I actually took the time to highlight, as I thought they were shining moments of brilliance within the story/writing. One was on page 133 of my Kindle edition:
"Imagination, she figured, just wasn't up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.
"It was the same as color. You could describe a new color only in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn't create the strange out of nothing" (Howey, 2012, p. 133).

To me, this summed up existence in the silos. It was mentioned by Bernard that they had been there for at least a couple hundred years, so the inhabitants, even those of the Order in "the know," were limited by their lives there. Solo, or Jimmy, is the only one who seemed to understand a greater existence beyond the silo and how much they were missing even through idiomatic sayings (like being bull-headed, which was a great dialogue exchange).

My problem becomes that it seemed like the further the story went, the more Howey fell in love with how he was writing the story and his words rather than simply telling the story itself. He wrote the first story as a standalone, then when it became successful, wrote the rest months later at about one every one or two months, and I wonder if it got too big in his head that he felt he needed to prove something and forgot that what he started with was fantastic and needed no improving.

My final thought: this novel reminded me about what one critic said about Silent Hill: Homecoming. To paraphrase and put this in context with this novel: the most frustrating thing about this novel to me was not what it lacked, but that it had shining moments of brilliance that you could see glinting here and there, but was always overshadowed by the other murkiness that surrounded it all. Those shining moments were great when they were great, but it seems as though the wordiness and lack of a moving plot (I often wondered if I could push it along quicker by skipping chapters which is never a good thing to say about something you're reading), as well as an author who seemed to forget his general purpose: telling a story instead of describing a story.

Excellent! I couldn't agree more with both of you. By romanticized i meant, that a lot of it sounded like a love story with a post apocalyptic setting. Juliet and Lucas, Holsten and Alice. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just not what i expected.

I think Solo(I like that name better) was probably my favorite character. Followed up by Knox. Solo was like Smeagle with a lot more hair and a kinder nature to me. For some reason i envisioned Knox as Barret from Final Fantasy 7. A big burly dude with a gun for a right hand. One that was bad ass but cracked jokes.

It absolutely was a romance thinly veiled as a post-apocalyptic novel. Having just finished it, it had redeeming qualities but not enough to where I think I'll revisit this universe. It was a drama, which is fine, but I was expecting something very different. That isn't the author's fault, he wrote what he wanted, but just not my styke of interest. There is a film adaptation on the horizon, and I probably would check that out, but probably only for free if it is a faithful adaptation, as I don't feel this was worthy of any other attention beyond itself. Overall, this was a decent drama, but not the novel I was looking for, especially with the hype it has garnered.

I was unaware of the hype this book had. I actually had a copy from a year ago that I never got around to listening to.

I feel bad that this discussion is so brief, but I think we are all on the same page. It wasn't a bad book, necessarily, just not what we were expecting...or very good.

To change the pace, if you guys were the author/editor what would you change about this book? Serious answers, and let's say you can't alter more than 25% of the text.

Real quick: the hype had and still has enough hype that Lionsgate bought the film rights and it is indeed in the works.

As for what I would change...I would get rid of a lot of unnecessary "rambling" within the latter chapters. I'm not sure if Howey chose not to come up with more action sequences and so decided to prolong (...and prolong...and prolong...) those little that did occur, or didn't want that to be the focus, but I felt like too many chapters were multiple 3-5 page rehashings of those before them. I'm not sure of Howey's ultimate intent when writing this (was it a drama? was it a romance? did he lose his original intentions as the characters became more heavily fleshed out?), but I would have changed the focus from the romances to the structure of the silos, and more specifically The Order. There was a lot that could have been done with those unnamed and faceless characters that had mere cameos, and those were the characters that piqued my interest the most. I wanted to know who else was on the radio when they were scrolling through stations. I wanted to learn all that was written in the packets that are given to the new leaders of The Order. Those would have been my own "selling points," and my focuses when writing. However, this would have not only changed the tone of the novel, but the scope as well. In "Garret L. Davis's Wool" romance would have been the subplot, instead of the inverse which was true of this novel. I think I just feel that Howey created a universe well-worth visiting and getting lost in, but that those things that perhaps our demographic wanted more of was not what he wanted involved with at all.

How about you guys? What changes would you implement to change the novel or rewrite a different one altogether like I seem to be implying?

I feel that the book was what Howey wanted as far as romance and such. If i were an editor for the book, i would have imposed brevity. That's really the only thing not directly related to the plot that i feel justified in saying should be changed. I found myself almost getting lost in the descriptions. Instead of spending 10 minutes describing the details about the stairs in the silo, from the number of holes per stair to the brand of polish used. Stick to things that are pertinent to the story. I don't mind a quick detailed explanation of things. Setting is very important. However it shouldn't detract from the story.
That might reduce the text by 25 percent though.

From what I have gathered, the next books expand on the history of the Silos and might give you more of those details.

You both keep talking about this book as a romance novel and I don't agree. I am not sure what the real plot of Wool was, but I didn't think it was romance. There definitely was a romantic element to it, but there just wasn't enough to it for me to buy into the idea that this was an apocalypse-themed romance novel. The romance was a vague sub-plot, if that. It seemed like an afterthought to me, or some half-baked idea. (half-baked in the traditional sense of being only partially complete, not like that stoner movie).

Then again, Wool itself seemed only 3/4 baked, or maybe 7/8 baked.

It amuses me that I asked how you would tweak the story, limiting your edits to 25% or less (because I knew what to expect from a less restricted question), and your responses were to write a new book and to trim the text by exactly 25%. What would you have said had I not given that 25% limitation? Tar and feather Hugh Howey? :)

So, if I had to change up to 25% I would replace much of the rambling latter third of the book. I'd cut out all traces of romance between Juliet and that guy she met twice, I'd cut out all that nonsense with the kids in the second silo, and I would add some grim reveal. Perhaps in Solo's Silo Juliet could find tapes of news footage from during the apocalypse or a detailed history of the various silos and their revolts, or really anything that made me care about their fate even just a little bit.