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Michael McCollen, an artist and divorced man in his fifties, has only one true love in this world, his daughter, Lisa. When his ex-wife threatens to keep him from seeing his daughter in consequence of his recent obscene behavior, he feels his personal life slowly begin to crumble. The only thing left for him is to make his own “paradise” , which comes in the form of beautiful young women and the strip club, Plan B. After meeting Linda, a dancer at Plan B, he hires her for his new gallery opening and is in no way subtle about showing his attraction for her. However, taking her home will prove to be a great mistake. After a night of heavily using drugs, Michael awakens to find the beautiful Linda lying next to him in bed. There is only one problem, though. She’s dead. This will prove to be the beginning of his new “paradise”. One in which Michael will descend into madness.
The author’s original intention was to present this storyline as a film. As such, Plan B Paradise, is introduced to the reader as an original screenplay. It is complete with camera directions, brief action descriptions, and overall the story is told with mostly dialogue. Although, at first it might be a bit hard to get used to this style, I still found it easy to follow and read through without difficulty.
Our protagonist, Michael, is a hard character to like or sympathize with. Because of his constant cursing, sexist remarks and actions, he comes off as rude and obnoxious. Of course he is also the villain of this story which makes the dislike of him understandable. The only point I did like was the love he has for his daughter. He sees her as the only good thing in his life and therefore, is greatly affected when her mother threatened to keep her away from him. This brings him to start thinking of murder and eventually falls to the temptation. Although the storyline is made to reflect the conflict of a man slowly becoming consumed with these murderous thoughts and finding that he enjoys such things, the story did not present enough depth in order for the reader to see this progression in character. I feel this stemmed from the fact that the story is mostly told through dialogue and not enough descriptions are given to support character depth. His murderous rage, therefore, seems to be very sudden and without reason.
The storyline itself presents an interesting theme that could have been better if handled more tactfully and with more elaboration. This could have made this tale comparable to the novel and film American Psycho which has a similar theme but with more plot depth. As an adult theme book, there are several sex scenes included that I felt were poorly written. The love scenes tie in well with the storyline, but the dialogue used often reads like a bad pornographic film. Which leads me to the topic of Michael, on several occasions, having sex with the corpses of women. This of course I mention as a warning to any reader who might find subjects such as these to be too unsettling.
Overall, I feel Plan B Paradise could have been more elaborated upon in order to make this a more suspenseful and well rounded story. In character and plot depth it feels very simple, although its strong themes and oftentimes harsh dialogue might still be too much for some readers. For these reasons I give Plan B Paradise 2 out of 4 stars.
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