Title: An interesting idea but a bad story
Product review: Wheeler's attempt to cross from screen-writing to novel writing is a disappointment. He has not grasped the intricaces and nuances of the medium, instead treating it like a television project or movie. The vocabulary is limited, the intelligence of the reader is underestimated, and the characters fail to ring true. By using almost exclusivly famous names of the begining of the last century, it almost feels like an article in People magazine about "celebrities". The reader cannot really relate to these people and therefore is always left feeling on the outside. I fear this is the sad result when stale, uninspired storytelling of the visual media invades the written world. Anyone who has decried the banality of TV shows will see this in The Arcanum. Now, having said that, the story of the Book of Enoch and the Lost Tribe is an interesting concept. Given more practice, perhaps Wheeler could actually produce a decent book about it. But not this time.
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