Most of you have probably already either read this book or played
the game, if not both. I haven’t played the game myself, so cannot comment
on how close this novel sticks to the plot therein, but the book has a few places
where it just feels like a level from a computer game. Dredd making his way up
the levels of a prison block, killing everything in his path as he goes is a good
example.
This level, sorry chapter, is also a good example of what saves
this book from being just a bad, plodding cash in. That is Rennie’s writing.
He writes Dredd to perfection, with an understanding of the character to rival
Wagner. His action scenes are tightly written and he has a flair for the flamboyantly
violent.
Rennie also does a good job of fleshing out parts of the Dredd
universe. You can feel his fanboy delight as he extrapolates on the stuff that
we all think is so important, like what buildings are next door to The Grand Hall
of Justice, or the mechanics by which the Dark Judges are imprisioned. There is
also a great elaborate visual joke concerning a man trapped at work in a shopping
centre by zombies (shopping centre... zombies... now why has no-one done that
before..?).
And while all this is very interesting and well written, it
doesn’t exactly make for a brilliant read. What we get is a lot of build-up,
most of which I suspect is the stuff that never made it into the final cut of
the game, and a brief third act climax. In among this, we are introduced to characters
from the comic, all of whom, I’m guessing, make an appearance in the game
somewhere.
I wonder if Gordon was given a checklist of characters and
locations to use in this book? This is not meant as a slight on the author. If
this is the case, then he has done the best job he possibly could with the limited
scope afforded by the FPS framework he’s working from.
All in all, a diverting enough read, though far from being
essential. It is a book that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would have been
a complete clunker.
Buy
this book from Amazon
