A Flavour of the Book:
“Once, the avocat, sitting in a barber’s chair, had been able – the
barber was so close, so physical, for God’s sake – to sniff the very odours of
the man’s body and read them as if they were words on a page of skin; sweat,
the tart sting of something else, an aftershave perhaps; above all, he could
smell faintly but unmistakably that the man had made love not so long ago, from
his arms the foreign stain of another’s body, from his crotch, though so
faintly that only an emotional detective such as himself could pick it up, a
paranoiac who feared and loved at the same time, the lustrous sharp nail-scrape
scent of semen that hadn’t quite dried…”
The Authortrek View:
Although Fred Johnston has a sterling literary background, this is a curiously
uninvolving tale. There’s much too
much focus on bodily fluids, both male and female. And there’s a surprisingly large number of incidents of
women being cut down by cars, which stretches credulity somewhat. The
characterisation is poor, and it doesn’t help that the main character is a very
self-obsessed lawyer, and it’s hard to identify with any of the characters, and
this dampens down the drama somewhat.
Fred Johnston can undoubtedly write, as the above extract proves, but
his prose is also quite rambling, and lacks focus. The Neon Rose suffers from just too much purple prose.
To find out more about the author, please visit our Fred Johnston page.
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