Critical Review: "Cult Classic" by Sloane Crosby

Quick Summary

Type: Novel, audiobook

Genre: Literary, mystery

Back Cover: "One night in Chinatown: Our heroine, Lola, is at a work reunion dinner with her former colleagues when she ducks out to buy cigarettes and runs into an ex-boyfriend. And then . . . another. And another. The city is suddenly awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past, and what would normally pass for a coincidence becomes something much stranger. The soon-to-be-married Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship but with the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned guru, might have an unhealthy, ahem, investment in the outcome. Memories of the past swirl and converge in mystical ways both comic and eerie as Lola is forced to decide if she will buy into romance, and possibly into a weird startup-slash-cult.

Both suspenseful and delightfully funny, this new novel from Sloane Crosley combines the breathtaking twists and turns of a psychological thriller with the will-she-won't-she of romantic comedy. Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted, surrealist meditation on love in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips and sanity is for sale."

Read Time: 3 days

Rating: 1.5 stars

Review

The book started with an interesting little story about ghosts entering a lottery so they could have twenty-four hours in the land of the living. I really enjoyed that little anecdote. I wish it had been the premise of the whole story.

But it was not the premise of the whole story. Instead, what I got was an entire history of the main character's dating life. The entire book, Lola is comparing her fiancé to her many exes, and it's so tedious. I didn't like any of the characters, which definitely added to the tedium, and I just wanted to get to what was promised to me: a psychological thriller/mystery. Did I get that? No. I couldn't tell you what was mysterious or tense about this story if I tried.

What I can tell you is that it was very clear to me that the author was trying very hard to be literary. Did she succeed? Not really. She also fell into one of the traps of literary fiction that a lot of not-so-great authors often fall into: she didn't have an interesting plot to go with the literariness of the novel. I don't mind literary fiction. I enjoy it, in fact. Some of my favorite books can only be considered literary fiction. What sets those apart from this drivel is that they also have engaging stories with complex characters. Did this novel have an engaging plot? No. Like I said, it's 300-something pages of Lola's dating history and her cold feet about her fiancé. Did this story have complex characters? Also no. A sheet of paper is less flat than the characters in this story.

That being said, it wasn't as laughably bad as some of the books I've rated five stars. I'd put it in the same category as Babel: trying too hard, not at all interesting, but not so badly written it deserves 1 star.