Oh John Ringo, No

It's book reviews like this one (thanks for the tip, Baz) that make all the rest look utterly insipid by comparison. If Hunter S. Thompson had started reading Robert Heinlein when he was a kid, maybe he'd have ended up writing reviews like this one (of John Ringo's 'Ghost') instead of wasting his time hanging out with movie stars and interviewing famous politicians.

"You think that paragraph alone would make this book awesomely bad, but no. IT GETS MORE SO. Yes, you will be horrified by a lot of this, because Mike Harmon's adventures are by turns awesomely horrific and horrifically awesome; I freely confess that I cannot stop reading these books, because *I have to see what Ringo does next.* I do, however, have a finely-tuned defense mechanism: whenever something trips my circuit breaker, causing me to cringe away from the page, I utter aloud a cry that resets my noggin. You will probably need it yourself, so I provide it here, as a public service: "OH JOHN RINGO NO.

GHOST is Ringo's own admitted Lord King Badfic, his id run wild. By his own account, he was trying to write several books he was actually contracted for, but GHOST kept nudging at him, and finally he just wrote the damn thing to *make it go away* so he could get back to fulfilling his contracts. Ringo locked the spewings of his id away on his hard drive, until he mentioned in passing on an online forum that yeah, he'd written another book, but it was *awful* and would never see the light of day. Naturally, folks were curious, and when Ringo posted a sample, nobody was more surprised than him to find that the response was, more often than not, "Hey, man, I'd buy this."

Be warned - if you read it at work, coffee might spurt through your nose and everyone will give you funny looks. At least, when your jaw isn't dropping open in undiluted horror. And you'll have to resist the urge to mutter, 'Oh John Ringo, no!' at wildly inappropriate moments."

Genius.