Cassie McCullagh

really compounds some of the problems with the plotting in this book.

It is hard work.

You know, I claim Scottish ancestry.

I have some blood in me, so I'm meant to have a head start.

But I found this really, really difficult to read because he writes phonetically as these people would talk.

And a thick Scottish accent is hard to understand at the best of times.

And he nails it perfectly on the page here.

It's 400 pages.

It's not a short novel at all.

And you really, if you can engage with the way he writes, then you've got a head start.

But even when you do that, it's slow reading and there are certain sections of the book where some chapters are more dialogue heavy than others.

And when it goes into heavy dialogue, you can read 15 or 20 pages, if you're like me,

And you think you know what's going on, but it's almost impenetrable.

And if you don't embrace right from the start this style of writing, it's almost like you're reading another language.

And you kind of are yearning for a glossary, but the glossary would probably be 200,000 entries.

Yeah, I mean, he paints everything big, you know, and as you say, the violence is really extreme.

Yeah, it's almost comic book-like.

You know, he's really sort of hammering you with it.

Subtle is not a word that you would use, I think, at any stage of this book.

And he's...