Thursday, July 09, 2009

I don't really know why I read this..


..but I was entertained by the idea. Just a basic novelization fodder which wouldn't work if it were not for the movie. Arnold's character, Eraser, isn't really described in any sense and you'll have to picture him in your head while you're reading the book. The love angle is pretty blandly narrated.

Some of the scenes containing violence border on sadism - this makes me think whether there's a difference between a written word and a piece of action cinema: the things that on screen only make me laugh (or sigh...) make me cringe when I'm reading them. Is this because we take the written word more seriously? Or is it because we have to picture the torture in our own mind? Or are we only accustomed to action movies being more and more violent - when the same things are described on page, we wake up to the notion: "Hey, this is pretty friggin' sick sadism!"

There's not much on Robert Tine in the web. He seems to be born in 1954 (or in 1955) and he's written mainly novelizations and tie-ins. Here's a list. In his early career in the mid-eighties, he wrote the postapocalyptic Outrider series as by Robert Harding, which I believe is a house pseudonym, shared also by other writers. If I'm wrong about this, please correct me.
Here's a link to the original cover.

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