Underground - Spoilery Book Rant

Underground
by S.L. Grey

What is it about:
The Sanctum is a luxurious, self-sustaining survival condominium situated underground in rural Maine. It's a plush bolt-hole for the rich and paranoid - a place where they can wait out the apocalypse in style. When a devastating super-flu virus hits the States, several families race to reach it. All have their own motivations for entering The Sanctum. All are hiding secrets.

But when the door locks and someone dies, they realize the greatest threat to their survival may not be above ground - it may already be inside...

Why I threw this book across the room in disgust:
*Spoilers*

And I mean it: I will totally spoil the ending so be warned if you read on!


I will confess I had decent time with this book until the reveal at the end. Some of the characters are very stereotypical, but I could mostly ignore that for the sake of the story.

But that reveal... Gah, it made me so angry!

The killer confesses in his diary and then there's this bit (paraphrasing, because I already threw the book out):
"There is a lot of crap about gamers being violent, and when they discover this, they'll blame World of Warcraft, but this isn't about violence. It's about survival"

Let that sink in?

Do you see what the authors did here?
(And I will assume they did this by accident.)

By letting the murderer say he didn't do it because he's a gamer, by letting the murderer defend games and WoW, they made the fact that he's a gamer become more important than it should be. They actually make it seem with this statement as if games are indeed to blame!

If they left out that statement, the fact that he's a gamer and that it might or might not have influenced his actions might not have crossed the reader's mind. Naming it in the confession and drawing such big attention to it, even when the murderer says it wasn't why he did it, the implication is that it actually is the reason he started killing. Especially because now that the readers know he's the murderer, they're less likely to take what he says at face value.

I get so sick of this kind of prejudice.

No: Games do not drive people to violence! Wearing black doesn't drive people to violence! Listening to Metal or Industrial doesn't drive people to violence!

Egh...

So with just a couple of sentences almost at the end of the book, the authors ruined this whole book for me, and I threw it into the paper bin.

I will be very wary when I come across more books by this author duo.