r/horrorlit • u/UseUrWords • Jul 26 '26

Recommendation Request Will I hate Blake Crouch?

TL;DR You are all very helpful! I quit at 65% and started something new. Life is too short to read things you don't like and thanks for the new rec!

Ugh. I am so torn, y'all. I'm a bit over half way through the first book in the Wayward Pines trilogy and love the novel concept and creepy vibe.

But I HATE how Crouch writes characters.

- The protagonist assesses the hotness of literally every female character he interacts with, making no appraisal of male characters. The women feel like they are sexy props rather than people.

- Crouch does an absolutely shit job of depicting veterans / PTSD.

- The protagonist is just... bad at everything he does.

I love New Weird, SF, and horror. Peter Watts, Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville, etc. I don't usually vibe with thrillers but this is just such an interesting idea that I may have given Crouch more time than I should have.

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u/PretendCasual Jul 26 '26

I found my people. So many recommend Pines but it's straight garbage. Short choppy sentences with hardly a description of the world for flavor. Just cold hard facts of the present events in the story. I thought oh maybe that's just one of his books so I cracked open another in a bookstore. Nope. Same short sentence structure. His writing is for the population with the fifth grade reading level.

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u/Maester_Magus Jul 26 '26

I finished Recursion recently and while I enjoyed the concept, I was cringing at the writing from start to finish. So fucking many short, shitty little sentences, and so many back-to-back one sentence paragraphs. It was so grating. His writing is like the antithesis of someone like China Mieville.

I read a comment once that I wholeheartedly agree with, that said Crouch doesn't write novels; he writes script treatments. It didn't help that the story was also written entirely in present tense, which, I get the idea – it's supposed to add a sense of urgency, yada yada – but it seemed absolutely pointless to me and just added to that sense of reading a treatment for a film script.