Book Review: THE CONSULTANT

I'm no Bentley Little completist, but I've been a fan of his books for a long time.

I read The Store when I was a teenager, and I recall understanding at least some of the novel's satire and social commentary, while also appreciating it as a very, very different sort of horror novel.

Since then, I've read several more of his books, including The Revelation and The Summoning; Dominion remains one of the few full-length novels I've read in a span of less than forty-eight hours. And recently, I've enjoyed The Policy and The Influence.

So I am very familiar with what Bentley Little does, and I'd say his books usually fall on a spectrum of "Just Okay" (The Academy) to "Excellent" (The Store). I don't think've read a bad one.

And I still haven't, though at times in the middle of this book I was starting to wonder.

The Consultant is built on a typical Bentley Little framework: a consultant is brought in to save a struggling corporation--CompWare--and instead puts its CEO and all its employees through a dozen layers of torment. It's sometimes memorable. Occasionally funny. And it's plenty weird in that trademark Bentley Little way.

But this is nowhere near Little's best work.

To start, the book feels formulaic. This is to be expected of a Bentley Little book--to an extent; Little does what he does, does it well, and that's about all he does. But his strongest works make you forget about the formula because you're so immersed in them: you care about the characters and wonder what obscene, totally random nightmare they're going to encounter next; you're perhaps thinking about some of Little's social commentary; and when you put the book down, it lingers with you for all the reasons a memorable book should.

I never felt immersed in The Consultant. The only piece of this novel that's going to stick around in my head for the long term is the antagonist himself, and even he feels like a lost opportunity. The settings in this book were generic and barely described. (Little seems to be at his best when he's writing about small desert communities, not high rises and suburbia.) Promising sub-plots (like the consultant stalking the protagonist's family) go absolutely nowhere. The characters here were not developed at all. Craig, the protagonist, is a thirty-something guy who goes to work, goes home, gripes about work, and promises to spend more time with his wife and kid. That's about all we ever get from him, and he's the best-developed character here aside from the memorably pathetic and evil title character. Everybody else is just a name on the page.

The action and horror in this book were definitely from the mind of Bentley Little--no chance of any ghost writers here. But with very few exceptions, the stuff in The Consultant was tame and, in this reviewer's opinion, flat-out uninspired compared to the "how in the heck did he think of that?" material I've read in almost everything else he's written.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this book--because I don't need out of this world imagery or literary-quality characters to at least enjoy a story and give it a good review--is that this is a fairly long novel (almost 500 pages), and in its current state, it doesn't need to be. Throughout the heart of the book, the middle 300 pages or so, Little bangs on the same chord over and over and over again: consultant thinks of a ludicrous new policy, calls a meeting, and Craig complains about it to his spouse and coworkers.

As I stated earlier, The Consultant's sub-plots go nowhere. I don't know of an issue in this book that matters beyond the chapter it arises in.

If the book were 500 pages because Craig and his family were being properly developed as sympathetic characters... or the horrors and motivations of the strange, bowtie-wearing antagonist were being explored... or maybe a sub-plot was followed that actually gets off the launch pad and goes somewhere... If any of this were the case, then 500 pages would be fine.

As it is, this shoulda-coulda been at least 200 pages shorter than it is.

And despite all this, I never doubted that I was going to finish The Consultant.

Little has been writing this stuff a long time, and even when he's phoning something in that was likely frustrating him, his stuff is very entertaining and readable.

So, points for the memorable bad guy. Points for the author being so talented that he can write 300+ pages of more or less the same darn thing without it being boring. And points for writing horror novels like nobody else.

3/5 stars.