A Review of Peter Clines’ “The Broken Room”
I Hear Dead People
If you follow San Diego author Peter Clines on Twitter, you know that he can be a bit irreverent. On his weekends, he usually will live-tweet a science fiction or horror B-movie that he’s watching, but he won’t tell you the title of the movie (as far as I can tell). What comes out is a stream-of-consciousness babble that can be a little hard to follow. However, if you’ve read a novel that Clines has written, you will know that, in this mode, he gets dead serious and bows before the altar of the genre that he’s writing about and lights some candles while he’s at it. My experience with Clines’ writing — and I’ve now read two of his novels, Paradox Bound and his new one, The Broken Room — is that he pays attention to his craft and sets out to write an entertaining book. The Broken Room might be unique because Clines writes in the afterword of this novel that he came up with the idea while watching a movie, so the reverent and irreverent may overlap here.
The Broken Room concerns two Latino characters: Hector and 12-year-old Natalie. When the novel opens, Hector is drinking himself into oblivion at a Los Angeles dive bar. He’s a former special operative or soldier who has retired but seems to carry demons about his past. In walks Natalie, who tells Hector that she has been asked by Tim — another soldier who was friends with Hector and is now dead, but Natalie can somehow communicate with — to seek out Hector and ask for his help to get away from a government institute known as The Project. Before Hector even has the chance to make up his mind or really question Natalie’s bizarre ability to hear the dead, a bunch of government security goons walk in and — bam! — The Broken Room is off and running, and just doesn’t stop. Hector and Natalie find themselves on the run across the western half of the continental United States as they deal with government agents and professional hitmen tailing them all the way.
What’s interesting about The Broken Room is that it eerily recalls the plots of two recently published books by Stephen King — which must be a coincidence as these books were likely published while Clines was in the middle of writing this novel. The pseudo-father-daughter relationship of the two characters (who are on the run from bad people) recalls King’s most recent novel Billy Summers. The use of children as test subjects in a secret U.S. government program recalls what King wrote about in The Institute. So you can take that as you will, but I see The Broken Room as less outright plagiarism and more as a B-movie-like homage to other writers. There are very few pauses for breath in The Broken Room, and while we get a significant portion of Natalie’s backstory, Hector remains largely a cipher. The whole point of this book is to just move — and, in the end, what feels like a B-movie comes off reading as a B-plus-movie.
While The Broken Room is entertaining, it is the type of book you can’t think about too much. After all, if Tim was already dead by the time Hector started his drinking career, how would have Natalie known how to find Hector in a particular bar? The good thing, though, is that The Broken Room doesn’t give you too much time to think as it moves from chase scene to fight scene — pushing its characters farther and farther into corners that feel inescapable. The fascinating thing about this book is that Clines has done an immaculate amount of research and you really feel that you’re following an ex-secret operative as he goes about his business blending in and stealing cars. Clines is so meticulous that you learn the model numbers of things such as grenade launchers when such items need to be used in the text. However, as much as The Broken Room is intriguing, the action can be a little chaotic, and perhaps the most interesting bit of fighting by Hector is seen (or not seen as it would turn out) from Natalie’s point of view early on.
I decided to read some other early reviews of this novel before sitting down to write this, and I saw someone say somewhere that they’ve read a lot of Clines’ output and he has never turned in a bad book. I’ve only read two of Clines’ books, as previously noted, and I would have to say that based on my limited knowledge that I would probably agree. Paradox Bound was a loopy time-travel book that was giddy with characters you cared about, and the same goes for The Broken Room (minus the time travel). This is a balls-to-the-wall, adrenaline-fueled action-adventure thrill ride. It’s nice to see that persons of colour can have adventures of this type, too, and Cline paints a chilling picture of how child refugees were treated during Trump’s presidency. All in all, The Broken Room is a near-perfect thriller, the type of book that will have you flipping pages relentlessly under covers as the plot thickens and thickens (I’m trying not to say too much about this read so little of it will be spoiled). If you’re looking for a book that takes itself seriously, but not too seriously, The Broken Room is the kind of action yarn that will have you saying “Wow!” as you read it. It’s quite good and proves that Cline is a master of pulp fiction, no matter what the genre.
Peter Clines’ The Broken Room will be published by Blackstone Publishing on March 1, 2022.
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You may also be interested in the following review: Peter Clines’ Paradox Bound.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
