Stephen Hayes reviewed The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
None
4 stars
A few months ago I read [b:Writing the Thriller|2285306|Writing the Thriller|Trish Macdonald Skillman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266699942l/2285306.SY75.jpg|2291512] and this was one of the example books it cited, and that was my main reason for reading it, because most of the other examples were hard to find.
But if this was a thriller, it seemed to break all the rules of the genre, at least the rules given in that book, which implied that one must have a big threat to the protagonist right from the start, and tension which never lets up. I fudn the story moderately exciting, and moderately well told. perhaps I'd better go back to the book on writing thrillers to see what it said.
It seemed to belong to the sub-genre of techno thrillers, but if aimed at a general readership it would have helped to have the naval terminology explained in a glossary. Eventually I managed to …
A few months ago I read [b:Writing the Thriller|2285306|Writing the Thriller|Trish Macdonald Skillman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266699942l/2285306.SY75.jpg|2291512] and this was one of the example books it cited, and that was my main reason for reading it, because most of the other examples were hard to find.
But if this was a thriller, it seemed to break all the rules of the genre, at least the rules given in that book, which implied that one must have a big threat to the protagonist right from the start, and tension which never lets up. I fudn the story moderately exciting, and moderately well told. perhaps I'd better go back to the book on writing thrillers to see what it said.
It seemed to belong to the sub-genre of techno thrillers, but if aimed at a general readership it would have helped to have the naval terminology explained in a glossary. Eventually I managed to work out that a "boomer" was a missile-carrying nuclear-powered submarine, and for a while I thought an oiler was a diesel-powered submarine, but it turned out to be something else, I'm not sure what. Some of the terms were explained the first time they appeared, but when they next appeared, 100 or more pages later, I'd forgotten what they meant.
