Monday, March 19, 2012

The Walk by Lee Goldberg

The Walk is a pretty good book, all in all.  Set in Los Angeles immediately after "The Big One," the story follows a TV executive who has to make it through the ruins of Los Angeles (he was visiting the set of a police procedural when the earthquake hit) to get to his wife (assuming she is still alive).

The story was good, if somewhat predictable in a lot of respects, and I'm a sucker for a good disaster novel.  This one has what you would expect - fire, flood, poison gas, looters, psychos, and the rest.  Goldberg is a good storyteller, and keeps the pacing as frantic as one would expect life post-disaster to be.

Some of the nice touches dealt with the fact that Martin, the protagonist, is a TV executive.  It informs so much of his character, and nearly everything he experiences he has to process in terms of the disaster movies and similar TV shows he's seen or worked on.  Naturally, Goldberg is a TV writer himself, so this is no surprise.

My favorite little touch of TV/movie theatricality in the book is the names of the chapters.  Most of them reference TV, movies and songs.  Nice touch.

4 comments:

Lee Goldberg said...

Thanks for the great review!

Lee

Jess said...

Sounds interesting, but holy cow, how fast do you read? It's one review after another! Glad I don't have to try to keep up! It's like a reading contest with Nomad! Remember, don't draw the information from the Kindle faster than it can display it, Byrne! ;)

Crash said...

Jess: I read really, really fast. That said, I just started reading Richard Burton's One Thousand and One Nights.

I'm not sure how it is on your Nook, but the Kindle shows how much you've read in each book (5%, 25%, etc.). I've been reading this for 3 days, and am only at 2%. This is a looooong book.

So I don't think I'll be posting a review of this any time soon.

Crash said...

Jess: BTW, kudos on the Nomad reference. I promise not to erase my Kindle's knowledge banks.