Dispatch

The great Bentley Little pulled it off once again in this incredibly fun read. After years of taking down evil organizations (such as Homeowners Associations and chain stores), you figure that Little would run out of steam. Or at least lose the ability to hold our attention for four-hundred pages. Wrong. In Little's most developed book in years, he gives us a remarkable hero in Jason Hanford. An outcast, with a struggling home life, who turns to the written word. Easy to relate to, and even easier to get lost in, Dispatch is one of Little's best efforts. A truly magnificent piece of horror.

It's a very tricky thing to write an entire novel around an irredeemably nasty character and get a positive response to it. However, writing just for positive reviews would be ignoble. Bentley likes his issues and is a bit heavy handed with the central theme of the power of letter writing in this release. Not an uninteresting endeavor, but having to be self-motivated the entire enterprise was a bit exhausting. Still, Bentley is nothing if not intriguing so I wouldn't tell anyone to pass this up and if it is the first thing you read by him, don't let it put you off. Bentley is a gifted horror writer.

Little has become one of my favorite horror writers, but I was very disappointed in this one. It really just drags on and on and it did not hold my interest. It took almost forever for the book to feature his trademark oddball themes, but even then it was too late.

Dark Characters and Anti-heros


I found Bentley Little's, Dispatch, to be well written and entertaining. However, the first half of the book seemed a bit slow to me. In fact, I put the book down several times - because of the slow tempo and some problems I had with Jason Hanford, the hero of the story - only to come back and try it again later. To Little's credit, the book does pick up in the second half and really gets revved up for the last quarter, redeeming both the storyline and the protagonist.

Let me explain my comments about the protagonist. I guess I'm a little old fashioned, but I like to root for the hero of a story. With Jason Hanford, a person with an unusually persuasive style of writing letters, I found this nearly show more impossible to do. For the first half of the book and part of the second, Jason exhibits absolutely no redeemable qualities. He uses his friends, hates his family, destroys lives and even kills people, all with no remorse. He even states this several times throughout the book. In the end, he does somewhat redeem himself, and it was for hoping that this would happen that I continued to read. But I did continue to read the book, and that says a lot about Bentley Little's writing abilities. If you like dark characters and anti-heroes, you'll like Dispatch.

- Bob Avey, author of the Detective Elliot series show less

With a creeping sense of discomfort, this book pulls you into Jason's world. His letters affect the world, he gets freebies galore and changes peoples thoughts on just about anything. His letters get results. He realizes that he does not just enjoy writing letters, but that he is a Letter Writer. As his life starts to fall apart because of his letters, he receives a job application to do what he loves. Jason falls into a world of nothing but letters and wonders if he can ever climb back out.

I was really surprised at how much this novel pulled me in. I didn't want to put it down. However, I found the ending a little unsatisfying, not that it was bad or didn't fit the book, but it was not what I wanted.

Here’s a good one from Bentley Little. Little has a way of taking a simple situation and turning it into a truly interesting and at times horrifying story. This is no exception. Here he takes the simple act of writing letters and wraps a complete story around that in a way only Little could. I was intrigued by the synopsis of the book and it didn’t let me down. I have a few more Bentley Little’s books on my pile to read and I can’t wait to dig into them. A definite read. It loses half a star for the ending which leaves a bit too much unanswered in my opinion, but overall a very satisfying read.

The first half of the book was original and engaging. The second half was ridiculous. Way too much emphasis on sexual references that were pretty much uncalled for and added nothing to the story line except to make me wonder why I bothered with the book in the first place.The second half of the book was just plain lame.