Interesting to hear Erik's side of things. He does raise some interesting points. But I still don't agree with much of anything he said.

For starters, I'd expect Winegardner to invent new characters. Hell, as I fart around with my own Part IV script, I've realized that a lot of new characters are necessary to tell stories in the GF world. So I don't fault Winegardner for creating new characters. It's just that he abandoned the original characters too much in order to follow these new characters around. And the new characters he did create weren't that interesting. Geraci and his father had a good rapport and were memorable, but everyone else blended together on the page. I couldn't tell them apart.

And when he was writing about the original characters he had to mess with our images of them. We didn't like the "behold wood" line because it was too graphic, we just didn't believe Mike or Kay would use a line like that. At the end of Part I, Mike was already a cold-hearted bastard and Kay had already seen what her husband had become. I imagine their sex life as pretty lame. So I just didn't think it fit. I could give MW the benefit of the doubt, because they were still married and would still have sex, just just not in that way.

We didn't like what MW did with Fredo because it cheapened Fredo's fragility. And if I were gay I would take offense to it. Fredo couldn't just be weak because the only trait he got from Vito was his sensitivity... No, Fredo had to be weak because he was gay or bi-sexual. Or whatever. All it ended up as was a cheap ploy to bring homosexuality to the GF world.

My biggest problem, however, was MW taking it upon himself to change Kay's abortion to a miscarriage. Kay's admittance that she had Mike's second son aborted was a cornerstone in their relationship. It was Kay breaking free of Mike's clutches. But MW had to cheapen it. And for what? What did it bring to the story? Nadda!

Then, MW fails to water the seeds that were planted for him to grow. Chief among them is Clemenza's death. We're told "that wasn't no heart attack" but MW gives him a heart attack. Very interesting.

Then, when we're told that Tom died of a heart attack in Part III... and we're given no reason to think it was anything other than a heart attack, MW has Hagen killed by Geraci in a lame fashion.

As for the books themselves, I found Returns to be hard to understand. MW twisted common sentences around instead of just spitting it out. Revenge was a little easier to read, but wasn't interesting. I had it out from the library, made it 150 pages through and just decided that it wasn't worth reading.

So I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about these books. But I'm glad you're hear to bring a new perspective to the discussions. They were a tad one-sided.