The Ink Black Heart

I really did try to like this book by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the 6th book in her "Cormoran Strike" series. I read 300 pages (of the total 1,012) and then gave up. The plot revolves around the anonymous and often poisonous internet posts to be found in games and chat rooms. The plot is this: Two twenty-ish people, Edie Ledwell and her often stoned partner, Josh Blay, create a comic strip in which the characters are all intermittently released from their graves at Highgate Cemetary in London. The main character is the heart of an evil man, Hearty. The comic becomes so popular on YouTube that Netflix is now interested in making it into a movie. Meanwhile, persons unknown have taken the characters and setting as a jumping off point for an online game, Drek's Game. The problem is that, one of the primaries, known online as Anomie, has taken a serious dislike to Edie and constantly spreads rumors and innuendo based on too much personal information about Edie, who at one point becomes suicidal as a consequence. Robin Ellacot, Cormoran's partner in their detective business, is in the office one day when Edie comes in asking them to find out who Anomie is. Robin turns her down because the firm has too many active cases and because cyber-sleuthing is not really in their bailiwick. The ground shifts when, a few days later, Robin reads about Edie and Josh being tasered and stabbed in Highgate cemetary. Edie is dead and Josh is critically injured. Edie's agent and the producer from the would-be film ask Edie and Cormoran to find the killer.

Aside from the length of the book, which in and off itself would not deter me, I was exhausted by trying to keep track of the players in the game with names like Worm28, Hartella, Fiendy1, who are known only through their chat entries in the game. It was just too hard for me to feel any connection because I didn't know who they were, what their relationships were to one another, and the constant use of slang and acronyms. Plus, I just didn't like ANY of them very much. 

The LA Times agreed with some of my sentiments, saying "at least 500 pages longer than the story warrants. Far too many of those pages are filled with tweets; characters discussing those tweets; transcripts of website interviews; and gamer group chats complete with all the concurrent private chats they spawn...These last are presented in column form; they are challenging to read and involve a mix/match game of characters, pseudonyms and red herrings that would give Agatha Christie a heart attack." They go on to disagree with some critics: "readers, critics and scholars often try to find the nature of the artist through the art. It is not fair, however, to invent a revelation where one does not exist....the critics she roused now parse her work for transphobia....but more than anything, the book feels like an attempt to take on the digital world and all the pleasure/peril of engaging with people you do not actually know in ways that are often not at all sincere."

I am also in agreement with Kirkus' review which calls the book "an overblown whodunit" that is "long, loose, and lax." They then conclude, "Who did the dastardly deed? After a thousand pages of this, the reader is likely to no longer care." Rolling Stone and other British publications assert that the book's plot is taken from Rowling's own experience with internet bullying, although she said she wrote the book before any of that happened to her. The magazine remarks that "The book takes a clear aim at “social justice warriors” and suggests that Ledwell was a victim of a masterfully plotted, politically fueled hate campaign against her. "