Narm: The series is rather darkly dramatic, but at times characters can be ridiculously prosaic and faux-poetic, not to mentioned obsessed with their children. Wolgast and Sara are both ridiculously possessive about their children, but Cronin presents it as a sanctified, divine instinct when it comes off as over-the-topnote "This precious and beloved being. this holy, miraculous, human person," referring to Sara's daughter, seriously referring to baby Caleb as "Beloved Of God" when religion is a total non-issue in the book and there are no devout characters alive at the time. They can also get really oddly sensual, as everyone seems to have an overdeveloped sense of smell and notes them at the most awkward times. The way he writes smells is something typical of authors who overcompensate for their lack of experience in an area (like a blind man describing colors or someone from the tropics writing about snow), which makes it hard to take seriously.
Serial Numbers Filed Off: An interesting case, easily overlooked due to both the timing and target demographic. Justine Cronin capitalizes on the vampire craze, but had they been called anything else there might have been detractors calling the book a case of serial numbers to Fallout.
Case in point- the story deals with highly immoral government practices involving and including research into the use of a virus to create superhuman soldiers in response to a tense political climate. The results aren't pretty. In the aftermath most of the world is a ruined wasteland and the experimental subjects of said project are loose. They even glow (Glowing Ones) and grow larger and more powerful the older they get, in addition to being functionally immortal (Super Mutants). A major plot point is retrieving a vital piece of equipment to repair the life-support systems of the hero's Doomed Hometown (as seen in the first two games). The leads of said hometown are crazy/homicidal/highly unsympathetic (first game). There's a bunch of well-equipped knightly soldiers wandering about killing mutated stuff (Brotherhood of Steel). We have yet to see the Enclave, but that might very well change. The vanished settlements might be a clue in that direction. Fallout Three also has a distinctly familiar feel, with the primary plot moving in a broad circle, both beginning and ending at the site of a 'project' that was heavily featured at several points in the plot. Oh, and both take place in the California-Texas-Nebraska area.
The resistance group from The Haven has several interesting members, such as Orson, Gus and Mira and yet all of them except for one are lost during the escape attempt, and that Sole Survivor is implied to have been Driven to Suicide afterwards, when it wouldn't have hurt the plot to have at least some of them make it to Texas and the safety of its soldiers, and then separate from the main characters there as they continued their mission.
The conflicted Galen Strauss and his party that pursue the main characters from the colony (including the widowed husband I’d Soo Ramirez, an unsympathetic Papa Wolf, and two minor watch members; a middle-aged man who’d provided some aide to the main characters and a sixteen year-old-girl) could have been a persistent pursuit force with then own subplot, maybe being gradually whittled down in various Viral attacks and/or finding the others and making an Enemy Mine situation (with Hodd the Papa Wolf maybe even encountering his Never Found the Body daughter at The Haven), but they're all attacked and presumably turned in the chapter that their pursuit is first featured in.
Wangst: Losing a child is a terrible, horrible thing, and anyone is entitled to a significant amount of angst over it, but characters let it define their lives to an extent that many other tragedies don't even come close. This wouldn't come off as grating if it was an individual issue, but it just occurs too often and undermines the strength of too many (female) characters.
Complete Monster: Captain von Berkow is a devoted Nazi hunting the Basque and his charges. Capturing a French informer, von Berkow savagely tortures him before cutting off his fingers, cooking them in goulash and, it's implied, forcing him to eat them. Pursuing his targets to a Gypsy village, von Berkow captures and sexually assaults one target before burning the village leader alive and having the Gypsies massacred by his forces once he has the information he desires. Dedicated only to his advancement in the Nazi regime, von Berkow even considers those who lack his sadism to be failures, believing only he has the drive to rise higher.
