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THE GRINDING may well be one of the first books I've ever read that manages to moonwalk into characterization. Dinniman kicks off the book with the love interest in trouble and THEN makes us care about her throughout the rest of the story, with well-placed anecdotes that serve to continually fill in the character. By the time the climax rolled around, I was nearly tearing my hair out in suspense. I was now the protagonist, I was in love with his wife, and it was all I could do not to shout in encouragement at my Kindle.
And what a climax it was! Jesus Christ, that one really came out of nowhere. The big twist blew me away and was so satisfyingly crazy that it might have even saved a badly-written book. But GRINDING didn't need that, because Dinniman's prose is so clean, efficient, and fierce that by the midpoint my eyes were just being dragged across the text as if I were tied up behind a truck. I literally had to slow myself down and take in every word. There were a couple of internet Easter eggs peppered throughout the book that, coupled with the totally insane premise and the mindblowing twist, made me wonder if perhaps this book might have been a sort of crowdsourced dare from a website like 4chan. I saw an "over 9000" joke and a Three Wolf Moon shirt. In a lesser book, they probably would have knocked my immersion out, but with writing this good they're actually sort of a plus. I saw a handful of grammatical errors, but nothing game-breaking. If the SyFy Channel has any sense, they'll option this for a film, because it beat the living hell out of Sharknado and all those other SyFy original movies. Horror fans, pick this one up. It does not disappoint.
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