I've never been very good at following that rule. Often, when I run out of things to read, I will walk into a bookstore and pick up a book that has an interesting cover and take it home. Surprisingly, it hasn't failed me yet.

Well, until now, that is.

For a few months now I've had one of these random purchases laying around. It's called Signals, by Kevin D. Randle. I finally gave it a try today, and man is it bad. The plot itself is kind of interesting, if somewhat cliché: SETI detects signals from some object fifty light years away and headed towards Earth, and the world rushes to figure out how to deal with the possibility of alien visitors.

But the writing. Oh, the writing. It sounds like the work of a ninth grader. I didn't get more than two pages into the book before deciding to write this entry. In fact, even the little sneak peek they print on the first page to catch your interest (which I wish I'd read before buying the book) is terrible:

Bakker picked up her Coke can, shook it, and then took a drink. "We have nothing in the signal, as yet, to indicate that it is some kind of message. All we have is a new radio source that is acting differently than any other radio source we have ever located. Since it is new, we have to proceed with caution here."
"So," said Hackett, "if I understand you, there is a signal, might be intelligent, might be natural and it is outside the Solar System. How far away is it?"
"Tough question, given that we haven't had all that long for observation, but if I was forced into an answer, I would say between fifty and a hundred light years."
For some reason Hackett relaxed. Something that far away was no threat to the United States or to Earth. At the speed of light, it wouldn't be able to get to Earth for fifty or a hundred years, or more, if it was coming to Earth.
Thinking in a military sense, however, Hackett said, "Then it is no threat to us."
"why would you even think such a thing?" asked Bakker.
"Because it's my job."

My god, I'm surprised this kind of thing got past an editor and into print.

Each time a character is introduced, we get an aside describing their appearance, their habits, their thoughts on various random issues, and what the author thinks of them. I suppose this is 'character development.' For example, on page five we meet Rachel Davies:

Davies was a young woman, which made her perfect for television journalism. She was short but proportioned to her height so that on television no one could tell. Someone had suggested that she bleach her hair so that she was blond, but she believed that a reporter, if she was good, could have hair of any color. She had green eyes that at times looked more gray and washed out than at others. Her features were fine, with a small nose, and the wide pouting lips that were all the rage this month. (emphasis mine)

As opposed to bleaching her hair so that she was an armadillo? How fortunate too that the story takes place during the month that the shape of her lips happens to come into fashion.

On the next page we learn a bit more about her:

Satisfied that she had milked all the humanity out of the story of a woman who claimed that she was repeatedly abducted and abused by extraterrestrial beings, Davies decided that it was time for her lunch. Then she could figure out how to add two seconds to the piece so that she would fill her allotted time. It never occurred to her that journalism was more than just filling the allotted time.

Oh, Rachel, if only you could see past your one-dimensional character flaws, you could blossom into the reporter you truly have the potential to be.

Lest you think I picked the one character who happened to be described this way, allow Mr. Randle to introduce you to another dramatis persona:

"What does that mean?" asked Steven Weiss, a graduate student who was working on his dissertation and had been for nearly five years. He was approaching thirty but thought of himself as a twenty-one-year-old freshman and often acted like it. He was short and stocky, with thick black hair and a beard that he grew in the fall and shaved in the spring. During the summer he sometimes wore a mustache, but he had no rule. He was dressed as a poor student in a threadbare blue shirt and worn khaki pants, but his bank account contained nearly a quarter of a million dollars and, had he asked, his father would have given him much more.

Only two paragraphs before that, Dr. Avilson is described thusly:

Avilson was a lean man with a shock of gray hair reminiscent of Albert Einstein, and there were those who claimed he cultivated the hair for that very reason. He wore thick glasses and for some reason preferred those with thick black frames. There were those who claimed that he cultivated the nerdish image because it gave him an identity others didn't have. And he wore old clothes and moth-eaten sweaters. There were those who claimed that he thought it made him look scientific, whatever that might mean. (emphasis mine)

What, is he being described by a tattling four-year-old?

I finally stopped reading when I got to this excessively long and increasingly excruciating passage a few pages later:

[Davies] walked from the parking lot to a wide sidewalk that led along the river. The water was dark, looking as if it was filled with silt, which might have been the case given all the rain. She came to the pedestrian footbridge, climbed the steps, and crossed the river. On the far bank, facing west, a dozen or so students were sunbathing. A couple of others were sitting on the grass reading.
She entered the student union, walked through it, watching the students swirl around her, some of them looking as if they knew what they were doing. A few of them looked dazed, as if they had been lost in the forest for days and had just made their way back into civilization.
She exited, walked up a hill, crossed a street, and found herself looking at the seven-story physics building. On top were a number of dish-shaped antennae and at the far end, invisible to her now, was a small observatory complete with a reflecting telescope. She had been in that observatory once or twice and knew that the university had built a new one far otuside of town, away from the light pollution.
She walked into the lobby of the building, looked at the directory, and learned that Sarah Bakker's office was on the fifth floor. She used the button to call for the elevator and rode it upstairs. She found herself in a brightly lighted but narrow hallway that had institutional tile on the floor, with light green paint halfway up the walls and light gray the rest of the way. Mounted periodically down the hall were television monitors set to display data coming in from one of the many university satellite experiments.
She found Bakker's office. The door was open. She saw a young woman who had long, straight hair. She was thin, almost skinny, and looked as if she could be a reporter on television instead of some kind of physicist.
Bakker's office was small, barely big enough for the desk, which was piled with books, reports, papers, journals, and Coke cans. There was a single chair for a visitor, a window that had closed blinds, some kind of rug on the green tile floor, and a poster on the wall that looked like a map of the universe.

Why do I feel like I'm playing a particularly tedious game of Zork? Two full pages to describe "getting out of the car and going to her office"? And that's disregarding the nonsensical sentences like, "She entered the student union, walked through it, watching the students swirl around her, some of them looking as if they knew what they were doing."

I mean, look, I know I'm not a pinnacle of eloquence myself. In fact, Randle's writing sounds a lot like the kind of things I tend to produce at first; I usually have to go back over my BinRock entries and fix all the awkward phrasing and stupid word choices from my first attempt. But that's precisely why I don't try to write and sell novels; I know I can't write. It seems nobody told poor Kevin Randle.