Duane Swierczynski: Fun & Games

I really liked Expiration Date which I read rather recently. I had been mildly disappointed in Severance Package, but Expiration Date was so good my expectations were high when I started to read Fun & Games, the first in the series of the exploits of one Charlie Hardie, ex-cop who sits houses and fills the voids in his life watching DVDs and drinking whiskey. It has already been followed by Hell & Gone.

My reading of Fun & Games wasn't as non-interrupted as I'd hoped it to be. I took it with me to the summer cabin we were for the last week, but kids wanted all the time me to do something. Still the book hooked me from the first words, though I must admit there's something slightly wrong with the rhythm of the book: the first action scene starts from the first pages and goes on until the page 200 and then something else starts to happen as if from the new beginning. There's a small misbalance there, but I'm willing to forgive that as there's so much speed and tension going on all the time.

But this is not merely a bang-bang thriller. The theme of Swierczynski's book is how a counter-reality enters into our world. There's a subtle hint to Philip K. Dick, but what makes Swierczynski's take on the theme fresh is that the counter-reality is a part of our own reality: it's the counter-reality of the media and the so-called reality television.