Subject: Frezza: "McLendon's Syndrome"

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 03:42:04 GMT

The latest Del Rey Discovery, Robert Frezza's "McLendon's Syndrome", makes
me glad I'm not an editor.  I'd hate to be the one making the decision
about so mixed a bag as this one.  The book is fun to read -- but the
reader does a lot of wincing along the way.

The syndrome from which the book takes its title is a disease which
makes its victims very pale and light-sensitive, causes their teeth
to grow some, and makes them allergic to most foods.  You get the picture.
This isn't a vampire novel, however:  The syndrome turns out to be
an exceedingly minor plot element, and one of the few foods to which
the 'vampires' are not allergic is chocolate chip cookies.

If I had to pin a subgenre identification on this book it would be
slapstick -- in both the good and bad senses.  Keystone Kops versus
Keystone Robbers, interspersed with a a freight of puns.

There's a real story buried in there, and a competently written one.
It starts as a murder mystery, in which everybody on a spaceship full
of losers turns out to be a plausible suspect (except me and thee --
and where were *you* on the night of...).  Once the mystery is solved,
it remains to deal with the repercussions -- and for our hero to beat
off an alien invasion...if he can just stay out of jail long enough.

This is not Frezza's first book, but I'm not sure I'd have guessed that.
His characters are completely two-dimensional, but still entertaining.
The plotting is fairly tight, and the story-telling works.  The puns are
excessive but some of the situational humor is quite good (if not subtle).
The 'surprise' near the end is telegraphed two hundred pages in advance.
All told, it's an entertaining way to spend two or three hours, if you
don't ask more of it than that.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope