V: Below the Threshold, By Allen Wold (1988)

This book is based on the original V television series, which may pique the interest of a select subset of nerds but don't be fooled, because it's the very definition of a ripoff. Churned out well past even the tail-end of the whole V phenomenon, it reeks of "Quick, write a V novel before people forget about V!" There's tons of sentences that make little or no sense contextually, obvious typos, and at least one part where the writer specifically refers back to something that he forgot to mention previously. As a result, it reads like one of those e-books people self-publish via Amazon, and I hate that shit. The worst thing about it though is the story, if you can call a guy walking around, taking the same meeting multiple times, talking on the phone, and repeatedly eating at Wendy's a "story". Seriously, for the first 100 pages or so absolutely nothing happens, and if you're an old fan of the show there's definitely no V action, whatever that was exactly. IIRC, it was mostly watching aliens eat gerbils and jerking it to the actresses who played "Diana" and "Lydia". I was a Lydia man, myself.

Er, they seemed hotter in the '80s.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about: in one part, our main guy goes to bed, decides he needs a drink, gets up, fixes his drink, heads back to the bedroom, remembers that he left his gun in the kitchen, goes back to the kitchen to retrieve it, and then finally returns to his bedroom for a third time. I'm not kidding, it's like the writer was paid by the letter, and when shit finally does pop off in the final pages it's still not very interesting or reminiscent of V at all. In fact, with a little find & replace this could easily be a (shitty) crime/light sci-fi novel that has nothing to do with V whatsoever. I'm gonna keep my eyes peeled for Wild Wild West: Below the Threshold or Alien Nation: Below the Threshold or maybe even ALF: Below the Threshold. I guarantee this generic money-grab has been repurposed somewhere, before if not since.

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