For the next 42 days we're going to be counting down to the release of SEAL Team 666. Why 42? Because it's the answer to the universal question.
I love a lot of the same ones everybody else does... One of my favorite
books in any genre is Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard, but my
favorite military novel that nobody else seems to have read is Dream
baby by Bruce McAllister.
So many war novels follow the format of the memoirs and do one
soldier's experience, which loses the sheer, inconceivable scope of
modern warfare. Dream Baby is a massive oral history with journals and
debriefing transcripts and memos that crackle with authenticity and
convey the reality of the war as this insane imbalanced stage for an
equally insane mission. McAllister spent ten years researching this book
and yet it never feels like a history dump. When he's done with you, it
seems utterly plausible that our government tried to exploit soldiers
with apparent psychic abilities to win the war in the dirtiest possible
way.
It can be elevator-pitched as Apocalypse Now meets Scanners, but you'd lose a lot of what makes this book so damn great.
3. What themes are overused? And is it overused, or just truthful observation?
There's so many that do the audience and the military a disservice, but
the one that bugs me is the Rambo stereotype. The tormented lone
ex-Green Beret who shies from violence but becomes a cyclone of
spontaneous defenestration when provoked. Audiences have to be sold on
the moral rectitude of anything the protagonist does... a hero can be a
hit man if he's forced out of retirement for one more job, etc... So the
good guy has to go through a lot of redneck kabuki
("Hey John, they kidnaped your wife!") before we can get our gun porn
on.
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Thanks, Cody!
And everyone please don't forget to Pre-order SEAL Team 666 from your favorite store:
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