Defriended

Everything about DEFRIENDED sets it up to be a horror story, mysterious, over the internet, possibly undead girlfriend, right? But it’s not, not at all. Sure it’s a bit creepy at times, but all good books are. What it really is is a mystery, one of the what-the-heck-is-going-on-here variety. And that’s a good thing, because while horror is good it could have so easily become cliché here.

The plot was good. It goes a lot of places you don’t expect and a few you do. There aren’t any big gaping black holes of question marks floating around from where the author didn’t bother to explain. One thing really bugged me though, the event that starts it all off, the hinges of the book if you will, is that Jason (the main character) Goggles Lacy. Who does that? It wasn’t an is-she-really-real sort of Google though, it was a run of the mill I-do-this-all-the-time sort. This just bugged me the whole time, because it felt so improbable, and I wish that he had done it for a better reason.

DEFRIENDED has a lot of what you would call pop culture in it. Jason makes references to bands all the time, but he never actually describes them, so unless you’ve heard of them it means nothing. This is disappointing because they’re probably significant in some way, and that gets lost. The book was also far too technology oriented, obsessively so. The main plot does have a good deal to do with Facebook, so it’s understandable to some extent, but Jason’s insistent checking of the internet and getting random texts from his buds gets irritating and doesn’t seem to have any sort of purpose at all. It felt more like a desperate attempt to connect with the ‘teenage generation’ than anything, and the story would have been just fine without it.

Jason’s motivation was interesting. I don’t think that he really loved Lacy, he almost said that himself. It seemed like he wanted to help her because he needed to be a hero. Something was finally happening in his life and he wanted to keep it going, but he was also helping her out of common decency. That’s not to say he wasn’t a good character though, because he was. At times he was subtly and ironically funny, at others he was the only sane person in the whole book. What I liked was that he seemed to realize just how ludicrous it was of him to be doing all this for a girl he had never met, but still knew why he continued to go along with it.