Book Review: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

This is a book that Houston's had since before I knew him.  He bought the book on a whim because he liked the cover art and thought the title was pretty awesome.  When I finished reading Water for Elephants he asked when I was going to read this one.  I'm waiting for another book to show up to read for a book club so I looked at the number of pages and decided that I had enough time to read this one while I waited. 

This book was really hard to get into at first.  The author tells the story of quite a few different people and the chapters bounce around between all of them.  It took a lot of effort to remember who you were reading about.  It didn't help that the chapters are pretty short so it's like reading a book that has it's own personal ADHD problem. 

I was a few chapters in when one of the characters was introduced, that I knew!  It's a real author, by the name of H.P. Lovecraft.  Come to find out, the whole book is a fictional story written about real authors.  The book takes place back in the early 1900's in New York.  All of the authors talked about in the book wrote what were called "pulps"  It's like a comic but with no pictures.  One of the authors is Walter Gibson who wrote a pulp called The Shadow.  I was telling my dad about the book and he got a little funny smile when I mentioned The Shadow.  After the pulp was created they made it into a radio show.  My dad and his brothers used to listen to it.  It would scare them so bad that they wouldn't want to go out and do their chores afterwards. LOL! 


Okay now the books redemption.  It's a story about all these authors writing their own stories and trying to find new ones.  In a crazy turn of events they all end up in the same place wondering about the same crazy set of coincidences.  All revolving around Chinatown, barrels of nerve gas hidden away by the military, a crazy Chinese guy seeking revenge for the loss of his family, and a, thought to be dead author who comes back for a brief moment to send a secret clue to the nerve gas discovered.  Wow, that was a mouth full.  It's SO suspenseful!  The book even has some horror elements that I totally am into. 

I would say that if you wanted to give this book a shot, that you should go into it knowing that you will pretty much have to remember everyone that was discussed separately in the beginning.  It will make so much less confusing when they all start coming together in the end. 

This book definitely redeemed itself in the end.  I was worried it was going to be the flop while I was in the first third of the book.  Thankfully my streak of good books still stands for this year.

To that continuing on,   !!!HURRAY!!!