Aurora

I’ve been moaning – mainly to myself – about the length of most modern genre novels these days. It seems as though they simply cannot come in at anything under 500 pages. Case in point: JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, the latest of which has more than 1,200! How can a detective story be more than 1,200 pages?

Are we all conditioned to mega-length stories by 10-episode TV streaming series? Are editors scared to tell their best-selling authors to cut? Or do readers think that with the price of books today, anything that doesn't weigh more than a small automobile isn't worth buying?

(I’m not saying it can’t work. Stephen King’s The Stand benefits from its length, because it has so many characters to explore. Although that said, I think the first version – the one his publishers asked him to reduce  – is better than the later hernia -inducing original tome he was able to put out years later when his selling power permitted it.)

All of this is by way of talking about Aurora, a society-breaks-down disaster novel – solar storms knock out electrical power for months – which is only 288 pages long. There’s an endorsement from Stephen King on the front cover saying it’s impossible to put down and I wholeheartedly agree; I read the book in a day. But when it was over, as much as I’d enjoyed it, I couldn’t help thinking that the story had leapfrogged right over some interesting plot points. I wanted more!

For instance, one main character travels across the USA without incident, even though the reader’s been alerted to the presence of murderous robbers on the way. A street grows food when there’s nothing to buy in the shops, but has no trouble from starving scavengers. A villain makes an appearance, mainly to get killed.

Please don't misunderstand; it’s all really, really readable. A genuine page-turner. And as a film it would work like gangbusters: one arresting incident after another. And that's when it occurred to me: David Koepp is first and foremost a screenwriter. He writes movies. So I think his primary sense of plot is geared to the big screen, where viewers have less time to think and wouldn’t want to anyway. As viewers, we demand less information, not more; immediate impact works. So what I think what we’ve got in Aurora is a fleshed-out screenplay, but just not quite fleshed out enough.

I still liked it though.