Book deserves to be banished

“Them” - by William Johnstone

There exists a certain type of book that can have such a massive and altering affect on a person's psyche. In Latin, the term is “Magnum Opus,” meaning “great work.” Such a “great work” can change the reader; the content of the work fuses with the content of the reader's mind and he walks away with a different general outlook. This, essentially, is the goal of any real piece of art. Them by William Johnstone is nothing like that.

From the very first page, which uses homophobic slander, to the final page, which meretriciously references Hitler, the book is filled with clichés, shallow metaphors, paper thin cultural statements and countless continuity errors.

The book sort of follows Jake Silver (I say sort of because he disappears for most of the middle section of the book) and an alien named Cag. Yes, an alien named Cag is in this book. Anyway, Jake Silver is a high school genius that is brutally bullied by his family and peers for being smart (because these things happen, y'know). Cag is a giant brain thing that wants to take over the Earth and make it inhabitable for the rest of his giant brain alien friends and enlists Jake to help him.

Johnstone seems to think that the entire world unanimously favors athleticism over intellect and that every individual is either wildly smart and mistreated or grossly infatuated with sports and is both academically incapable and directly against education. Every character in this novel is completely unipolar representing either pure good or pure evil. Johnstone attempts to justify.

The book is filled with crude, inappropriate descriptions of sex and violence. I use the word “inappropriate” not because I find such subjects out of place in a respectable piece of work — on the contrary, used properly, sex or violence can be remarkably powerful for conveying a variety of messages — but because they are used for no reason that I can think of beyond cheap thrills for the reader.

There's a character that goes on an axe rampage (don't ask me why, I'd rather not remember) and instead of talking about what kind of person the character is, how he got the axe and why no one is stopping him, Johnstone chooses to write about how the blood spatters after the impact.

Beyond that there are several other issues he attempts to tackle (with the effectiveness of Steve Urkel tackling the Incredible Hulk) such as gender roles that he writes as though he supports them, educational systems that he speaks so harshly against but without ever mentioning why other than through severe generalization, and family values that he again, writes about as though they are largely wrong without mentioning or suggesting what is right. This is just a few of the few massacred efforts toward making a point that the author makes.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of depth to this book if it were at least entertaining. I mean, I'm a big fan of martial arts movies and it certainly isn't often you find a life altering story in one of those. But the problem with this book isn't just failing at what it's saying, why it's saying it, but at why it's saying it as well. As you recall, the plot is about an alien named Cag trying to steal the planet. A plot like that is, quite frankly, cheesy.

I've heard that to truly understand a book you need to read it a few times (I think three is the number people like). If that's true, I'm really dreading comprehension of this book. Maybe that's my problem: that I just don't get it. Maybe it's just so cryptic and above me that I just failed to sink in all the power of an alien controlling a man's mind and making him masturbate in public. Yeah, that actually happened — it was stupid. I suppose that I shouldn't be too hard on this book. Not every piece can be a Magnum Opus.