Customer Reviews
A book with no redeeming quality whatsoever - By: Daniel Jolley, 30 Nov 2002 
Were it not for a neurotic obsession with finishing any book I start, I would never had read this whole novel. About the only good thing I can say about The Chosen is that it is not boring. I can add that it is also not erotic at alll, nor is it scary. Vera, the protagonist, is a restaurant manager soon to be married. Out of the blue, she is offered a job managing a restaurant at a remote inn for an exorbitant salary. She turns down the offer because of her fiancée; arriving home, she finds her fiancée "entertaining" a girl & a hermaphrodite. She then takes the new job & moves out of town, bringing along three of her coworker friends to run the place. The restaurant & the connecting inn just happen to have once been a sanitarium where the patients were tortured & brutalized. Don't let the back cover mislead you into expecting some haunted house aspects to the story--the sounds heard in the night are judged to be the doors of an elevator opening & closing, & nothing ghostly happens at alll. Basicallly, we are treated to literallly hundreds of pages of demonic, disgusting, pointless sex acts which are anything but erotic. I don't mind reading scenes with sex & violence, but the reader of this book is simply deluged with the same lewd descriptions over & over again. Vera begins having erotic nightmares--that's fine, but I don't need to read the same description of the whole nightmare twenty-something times. The characters themselves are superficial & unsympathetic, seemingly capable of expressing anger, sexual desire, & nothing more. Two of the men can only communicate by throwing insulting sexual innuendoes at each other, & their material is below that of even the most dirty-minded juvenile.
There is a story of sorts buried in the morass of sexual descriptions. Every so often, it seems like it might get interesting, but alas it never does. Furthermore, the author does not even bother to tie up many loose ends. The most obvious question harkens to the title itself--Vera was "the chosen," apparently, yet I never found out why she was chosen or exactly what she was chosen for. Some of the basic premises of the plot itself simply make no sense. One thing I found most gallling occurred in the last few pages of the book--Vera refers to something that she has no knowledge of whatsoever because the only person to have discovered it is one of the other characters.
I could go on & on. Suffice it to say, this book is badly written & reeks of adolescence. As is typical with Lee, the plot seems to exist only for the purpose of providing him with a means of unleashing his deep torrents of sexual fantasies. My copy has a number of typos & grammatical errors in it, but I can hardly blame an editor for letting these things slip because no one should have to read this novel thoroughly. I hate to criticize a novel in such harsh terms, but The Chosen may well be the worst book I have ever read.
