Jan 2, 2011

Thrown Clear


The past few days have been a rough one, with both my wife and myself getting sick. (New Year's Resolution - get a flu shot) So I intended to take it easy this morning, with no larger goal than to get through a few hundred pages of reading or fall asleep trying.

I was well on my way, plowing through the first several chapters of Joe Schreiber's Red Harvest, when I read this.

"Listen to me, Trace told him. I don't know who you are, but I am in possession of a very special set of skills. If you bring my sister back right now, unharmed, then I'll let you go. But if you don't, I promise you, I will track you down. I will find you. And I will make you pay."

Sound familiar?


In case you can't stream that, here is the quote from Liam Neeson's Taken (2008)
I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
I don't know if this was intentional or not. (I have a hard time believing it's mere coincidence) but I don't know how this is an acceptable practice. Someone should have caught this. Can you imagine if Han saw the Death Star for the first time and said, "I think we're gonna need a bigger spaceship" ?

When I read this, my suspension of disbelief hit a wall doing 100+. It's through the windshield and smeared across the pavement. Things don't look good.

I was enjoying Red Harvest up until this point. I don't know if I will pick it up again.



Update: I found the following quote from Schreiber in this interview with Suvudu.

"5) The character of Rojo Trace is based on Liam Neeson’s character from Taken, to the extent that I think I even ended up stealing some of his best lines for the book."

To which I reply - why?

4 comments:

  1. I read the quote from the novel and even before I scrolled down I was thinking, 'huh, that sounds like that one line from Taken...' (A movie I haven't seen since the cinema mind you...) Definitely makes me reluctant to try any of Shreiber's work, and I've been thinking about picking up Chasing The Dead...

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  2. I gave my copy to my brother in law and when he came across this passage, he stopped reading the book.

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