A Review of Jason Mott’s “The Crossing”
A Truly Terrible Tome
I read bad books, so you don’t have to, and it is with profound sorrow that I must say that Jason Mott’s The Crossing is one of those books. I had high expectations for it — the publisher indicated that it was for fans of Joe Hill. However, what Joe Hill has that Jason Mott does not have is writing skill. Thus, what we get is a dystopian novel set roughly in the present time frame about two siblings running away from their foster parents so they can see a rocket launch. Not exactly the most compelling synopsis, but that’s kind of my point. The Crossing is a pretty boring book. This is even suggested in its rather generic title. Do a Google search on it, and you’ll be brought to results about a current network TV show that shares the same name.
The only thing going for this title is that it has a crackerjack setup, which is probably the only reason why it ever got published. (Aside from the fact that Jason Mott is a bestselling New York Times author, which seems to grant one liberty to write bad fiction.) Anyhow, the setup is that there is a disease out there, imaginatively called “the Disease,” that kills from the top down. While this disease is probably epidemically impossible, old people are the first to go, then its victims grow younger and younger — meaning that it will eventually kill off those of child-bearing age, leaving only children behind. Because of this threat, the world has seemingly entered into World War III and those children, once they turn 17 years old, are being drafted and killed in this war.
So far, not bad, right? Well, The Crossing is a road novel as two twins, Tommy and Virginia, hit the highway and run from their home in Oklahoma to go to Florida so they can watch a rocket launch carrying a probe that is headed for one of Jupiter’s moons that supposedly carries life below its surface. However, I should note that if aliens exist on Europa, as the book teases, we never meet them. In any event, Tommy is basically bailing out on fighting in the war as he has received a draft notice. He’s the brawny of the pair, and we know this because he is torn between getting his sister to Florida to watch the launch and actually enlisting to fight. His sister, Virginia, on the other hand is impressively smart and has the superhuman ability to remember everything, and, thus, seems against the war. Chasing the pair is the foster father, who happens to be a cop. His sole motivation for chasing the duo is so that he can get his foster son off to war. Nice dad, huh?
What’s so bad about all of this? Well, first off, I can get away with an info dump in my review because it’s a short piece of writing. Mott starts The Crossing off with one big info dump that brings readers up to speed on the back story. He ignores the “show, don’t tell” rule. He simply tells, and tells, and tells. The next thing to criticize is the fact that the novel is largely plotless. It just ambles around the southern American countryside looking for a story. Though Tommy and Virginia’s foster father is chasing them, it’s unclear if he’s a good guy or a bad guy. I mean, any father who wants to see their son die in a war must be a bad guy, right? Well, The Crossing sometimes paints him as a sympathetic figure. I suppose this makes him more than being one dimensional, because the twins already are one dimensional and easily categorized. But it doesn’t give him much motivation for what he’s doing.
Next, the novel breaks away from the action to showcase stories of other victims of the Disease. This is simply done to pad the book out to novel length. These stories add nothing to the plot. They’re simply short stories inserted into the guts of The Crossing. Also, we occasionally get letters that Tommy and Virginia’s real parents have written to the twin’s future selves. Again, this is padding. I mean, consider this: the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. What’s the motivation for writing to your children when they’re probably going to die before they’re old enough to read?
As you can see, criticizing The Crossing is a bit like shooting fish into a barrel. Is there anything good I can say about this book? Well, I could suggest that it might be a good one for a young teenager. Seeing it’s release date, it’s also a good beach book because it’s trashy enough and doesn’t make you think too hard (trying to think about this book is probably an exercise in anathema). Beyond that, this is poorly written SF. Even the climax of the book kind of peters out. I mean, given that the whole point of the novel is seeing some rocket launch, you expect some more pop and sizzle into that launch. But no. Also, before I forget, I should mention that there’s an “Oh, come on!” style plot twist in the middle of the book and Tommy and Virginia do get separated from time to time, but they always manage to find each other in crowds.
Logic, or a lack thereof, is the main problem of The Crossing. The twins encounter their foster father early in the book on a deserted road at night and manage to overpower him. What do they do? They simply put him in the back of a police car and don’t bother to hide the car in a secluded spot or even handcuff him and throw away the key, so he can’t chase them all the way down to Florida. (If they were me, I’d actually take the car!) I mean, if you don’t want to be caught and sent off to boot camp, you would probably do a whole lot more to make sure your pursuer is incapacitated, right? It’s stuff like that that make me wonder if what I read was simply a draft, and not a finished book. In any event, The Crossing is a bad book. The easiest thing to do is simply avoid it. There. I just read a bad novel so you can get all of those minutes and hours you would have otherwise spent reading the book back, so you can go and enjoy something else. I am hopeful that it is something better and of higher quality than this.
Jason Mott’s The Crossing was published by Park Row on May 15, 2018.
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