There are some books that are so bad, so disappointing, so unimaginably pointless that they kill your desire to read for a time. They leech away any hope, any light, any happiness that you once gleaned from the hobby. The Removed is one such book.

It’s difficult to know where to start, so I’ll just begin with the characters. They may as well have not even existed. If Hobson had written this story devoid of characters entirely, it would have changed very little. There is no reason to care about a single one of them, despite the contrived issues that plague each member of the family. Sonja has to be one of the most annoying literary creations that I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing. I’m confused as to what Hobson was attempting to accomplish with this brain-dead, fickle, sex-obsessed contrivance. I didn’t care about her ridiculous romantic pursuits any more than I cared about Edgar’s supposed addiction to drugs. The only characters with any semblance of realistic humanity were Maria and Ernest, and they were so cliche that I couldn’t muster much of an interest.

The plot element involving Ray-Ray’s death at the hands of a police officer is glossed over and forgotten. The reader never learns enough about Ray-Ray to care about his death, let alone to understand why it had impacted this family so significantly. Edgar’s descent into the Darkening Land is boring and, I’ll be quite honest, just outright stupid. The bits about Native American folklore and mythology that Hobson sprinkled throughout were interesting enough, but overshadowed by how horrible the rest of the story was.

The writing. Oh God, the writing. It’s so bad. The Removed is written at a high-school level, and that’s being very generous. Bland, mediocre, pedestrian; however you word it, there’s no getting around the fact that this novel is poorly constructed in every facet. I listened to the audiobook, and I was initially excited because of the multiple narrators. Unfortunately, the narrators are all as awful as the prose itself. The voices they attempted to perform for different characters only made the whole experience even worse.

Another excellent premise slaughtered by horrible execution. Disappointing.