Book Notices | The Sleep Experiment by Jeremy Bates / Elevator Pitch by Linwood Barclay

Jeremy Bates, The Sleep Experiment

Amazon   UC Berkeley professor Roy Wallis is conducting a sleep experiment in the basement of a soon-to-be-demolished building on campus. He's got two students working with him, both of them enamored of the wealthy, confident, allegedly brilliant Wallis in their own ways. The plan is to keep watch over two subjects who will be staying in an apartment fishbowl Wallis has built. An experimental gas will be piped in that will prevent the two from sleeping, and this will go on for, well, as long as it takes. After a long setup, the experiment starts, and things go downhill from there. Wallis's methods aren't exactly kosher, and his motives aren't pure. And by the time anyone cottons on to this, it's too late. Bad things happen. Seventy-five percent of the way in, the book becomes a gore fest, and the plot becomes almost secondary. Indeed, the story is not tight at all. Characters are introduced who don't wind up mattering; characters who do matter aren't introduced. The relationships described in the first part of the book come to very little. And the story is scarcely credible. (And not just the really crazy parts.) I left the book dissatisfied.

Linwood Barclay, Elevator Pitch

Amazon   New York is brought to its knees when some evil mastermind gains control of a few elevators and kills a bunch of people. Suddenly, vertical travel in this vertical city means taking your life in your hands. New Yorkers are trapped in their high rises or are having heart attacks on the stairs. Governor Richard Headley is at pains to respond without creating a panic, and the media--particularly Manhattan Day writer Barbara Matheson--isn't making his job any easier. The story follows her reporting, the mayor's response to the crisis, a related police investigation, and a side story about a domestic terrorist. It's a good read, built on an interesting premise, but not a great one. I was never lost in it, as I have been reading other books by Barclay.