I grabbed this book at a book fair for free. It was not free so much as the book fair had a deal where you could bring a bag in and they would charge you five dollars to fill the bag up. So this book was more or less free, and given how thin the book was, and how over stuffed the bag was, like I said, it’s essentially free. Wow, you’re thinking, you’re really spending a lot of time explaining just how free this book was, certainly that can’t be the groundwork to explain how not worth the cost of the book was right? Wrong! It’s not worth even the freeness. Had it not been 190 pages of relatively big font and lots and lots of chapter break I probably wouldn’t have finished it, and even saying that I did finish it is a bit of a stretch as I most certainly skimmed large sections of it.
So what is Sliver? Sliver is the book that the 1992 erotic thriller Sliver is based on. This is the movie that has William Baldwin (Billy) and Sharon Stone in it. It was a quick follow up to the success of Basic Instinct, and if you’re asking yourself, wait, isn’t Basic Instinct kind of bad? Yes it is, but there was a whole slew of follow-ups trying to capture that magic. That magic was mostly the sleaziness of Joe Eszterhaus in his prime, and the movie here was also Joe Eszterhaus, but just not in his prime. The material is also bad. Billy Baldwin owns a high-rise building that’s developing the reputation for people dying. Sharon Stone, fresh off a divorce to Martin Landau, moves in and starts an affair with Billy not knowing that a) he’s the owner of the building and b) that the building wired top to bottom with surveillance equipment, which is odd given how inconspicuous cameras were in 1990. There’s a murder, there’s other stuff, and it’s all annoying and, worse, boring. This is not the Ira Levin of Rosemary’s Baby or The Stepford Wives, but the Ira Levin of Son of Rosemary and the Nicole Kidman Stepford Wives, sadly.
