Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Gamification / C-Monkeys
    Unavailable
    Gamification / C-Monkeys
    Unavailable
    Gamification / C-Monkeys
    Ebook258 pages3 hours

    Gamification / C-Monkeys

    By Keith Hollihan

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    This is a double novella “flip book” pairing a modern corporate suspense story about the cover-up of a CEO’s illicit affair, with a 1970s-era science fiction thriller about an oil company’s environmental disaster. It is an exploration of the paranoia inherent in business and the thin line between competition and conspiracy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChiZine Publications
    Release dateNov 15, 2013
    ISBN9781771481526
    Unavailable
    Gamification / C-Monkeys
    Author

    Keith Hollihan

    KEITH HOLLIHAN has worked as a business analyst and a ghostwriter. He has travelled widely and lived in Japan, Canada and the Czech Republic. A Canadian, he now lives with his wife and sons in St. Paul, Minnesota. Flagged Victor is his second novel, following the acclaimed The Four Stages of Cruelty. WEB: keithhollihan.com TWITTER: @KeithHollihan

    Read more from Keith Hollihan

    Related to Gamification / C-Monkeys

    Related ebooks

    Thrillers For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Reviews for Gamification / C-Monkeys

    2.5/5

    3 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Gamification and C-Monkeys are a pair of related novellas sold together as a “flip book” with a different cover on each side. The effect is clearly meant as a call-back to days when publishers sold slim, pulpy novels in bound pairs, and although both stories include familiar beats, Hollihan leavens each with modern ecological concerns and stylistic touches.

      I decided to start reading these novellas thanks to a highly scientific method that involved skimming the first page of every review copy I have in my possession until I found one that hooked me enough to keep reading.

      Gamification, a thriller about corporate espionage, offered just the right combination of spare prose and business jargon. I was soon caught up in the plight of the main character, a former corporate executive and current ex-con recently released from prison and struggling to make ends meet. When he begins working under-the-table for his old company cleaning up after the CEO’s ill-advised affair with a woman at a rival company, things start to get hairy.

      Hollihan definitely knows his jargon. I’m pretty sure that if you turn this book sideways, a few inter-office memos and a quarterly report might fall out. He also has a pretty solid grasp of thriller conventions and pacing; the book starts out slow but steady until things inevitably begin escalating and Hollihan pulls the rug out from under his main character.

      It was exciting reading, and I definitely enjoyed the experience, but the end of the novella left several story threads unresolved or unexplained, and I was admittedly a bit confused about who did what to whom and why. It felt a bit like Hollihan ignored motivations and explanations in the name of surprise and excitement. It worked in the moment, but ultimately left me unsatisfied.

      I assumed that C-Monkeys might shed some light on the parts of Gamification that remained unexplained, but I was sadly disappointed. At one point in Gamification, the main character is given a pulpy dime-store novel about a mad scientist on a mysterious island full of giant salamanders. C-Monkeys is essentially the expanded version of that novel’s summary.

      Unfortunately, in expanding the story, Hollihan doesn’t bring much more to the table. The main character in C-Monkeys is a cipher with no backstory and no clear motivations. We are eventually told a bit more about who he is and why he might want to sneak on the island, but it comes late in the story and feels like an arbitrary info-dump instead of a shocking revelation. Honestly, nothing about C-Monkeys felt particularly surprising or remarkable.

      I wanted to like Gamification and C-Monkeys more than I did. Both novellas were eminently readable, and Hollihan gets a surprising amount of entertainment mileage out of corporate espionage and the particulars of drilling for oil, but Gamification’s many twists add up to a whole lot of nonsense and C-Monkeys just feels unnecessary. I might be up for reading more of Hollihan’s work, but I can’t recommend this pair of novellas.