This was recommended to me by a book club member, as I'm an avid horror fan. Oh, it was horror, all right, but in all the wrong ways: this BOOK was horrible. I tried to give it a two-star rating, but it just kept getting worse the more I read. In fact, this was one of the WORST works of fiction I've read in a very, very long time. As in, top-five worst ever.
In short, this book is trash. Don't waste your time. It's nothing more than a parade of utterly cliched, one-dimensional stock characters - to the degree that it's offensive - conceived by a person who clearly has something bordering on a victim complex and a scatological fetish. Gay Muslim: check. Similarly ridiculous characters with the dumbest monikers I've ever seen, like dudes named "Heart" and "Ghost"... BIG TIME check. Gay bashing a'plenty, with gross descriptions of what seemed to me to be reminiscent of someone's twisted sexual fetish: check. Less-than-thinly-veiled jibe at religion and spirituality: check. AIDS, sexual assault, including in the form of rape-stabbings: check. If the author is trying to write "gay" horror... he needs to not try so hard to check all the diversity boxes at the expense of his story.
Gay Muslim in a horror novel? Seriously? Is that supposed to make it "edgy?" "Transgressive," even! Brave you!
Yeah, it doesn't. It's just pandering, mindless garbage masquerading as new-wave popular fiction. I would be straight pissed off if I had paid for this thing; I probably would have returned it, as I don't want to support this kind of writing with my hard-earned dough. Vote with your wallet, here, kids: dollar signs, or the lack thereof, are what matter to publishers, and refusing to patronize this trash sends a loud and clear message.
I realize that I'm pretty harsh in this review, but I think it's warranted, and I hope reviews like this (and there are quite a few for this sorry excuse for a novel) dissuade like-minded "authors" from sending this kind of boring, mindless dumpster fodder out into the world. Books like these irk me no end, first and foremost because they're nothing more than shameless ass-kissing, penned by people with no talent... with a $20 price tag.
This book is great at one thing, however: it's a great example of everything wrong with modern fiction writing. This is a straight-up, master-class work on how to shoehorn into a poorly-conceived narrative boring, highly (even offensively) stereotyped, soulless characters with no realism, which apparently isn't supposed to matter these days, as long as they check off each and every diversity box under the rainbow, and better yet, create some new ones. No self-respecting publishing house would give something like this the time of day if it didn't include all the ABC characters drawn from a "diversity" laundry list, in an attempt to make a non-starter palatable and perhaps sell-able.
In addition to the grotesque characters, I think what bothered me the most was the insufferably bad writing, which, honestly, had all the sophistication of a short story written by a middle-schooler... except, every now and again, you come across one of those who has talent. Most of the paragraphs are little more than a few sentences long, with short, ill-composed sentences that are awkwardly worded. The writing was just... hokey as hell. Example: descriptions like, "a wraith of guilt wrapped around his neck the way an infant chimpanzee clings to its mother."
Um... wat?
What the hell kind of imagery is THAT supposed to evoke? Just... puerile and dumb. And the rest of it isn't any better. The prose is chock-full of these weird analogies which make absolutely no sense.
I'm not even going to bother with a synopsis of the plot, because it didn't really have one. It jump-cut to a new scene every few pages, which is difficult to pull off effectively even in a well-conceived and sophisticated novel written by a talented author. It certainly didn't work here, because none of it made any sense.
I just straight-up hated this crappy book. I did finish it, but the best part was that it took me little more than about 90 minutes to do so. Steer clear of this one; it's a waste of 90 minutes of your life. In fact, I think I'll conclude with one of my favorite quotes, by Tom Waits: âThe world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."
Amen.
In short, this book is trash. Don't waste your time. It's nothing more than a parade of utterly cliched, one-dimensional stock characters - to the degree that it's offensive - conceived by a person who clearly has something bordering on a victim complex and a scatological fetish. Gay Muslim: check. Similarly ridiculous characters with the dumbest monikers I've ever seen, like dudes named "Heart" and "Ghost"... BIG TIME check. Gay bashing a'plenty, with gross descriptions of what seemed to me to be reminiscent of someone's twisted sexual fetish: check. Less-than-thinly-veiled jibe at religion and spirituality: check. AIDS, sexual assault, including in the form of rape-stabbings: check. If the author is trying to write "gay" horror... he needs to not try so hard to check all the diversity boxes at the expense of his story.
Gay Muslim in a horror novel? Seriously? Is that supposed to make it "edgy?" "Transgressive," even! Brave you!
Yeah, it doesn't. It's just pandering, mindless garbage masquerading as new-wave popular fiction. I would be straight pissed off if I had paid for this thing; I probably would have returned it, as I don't want to support this kind of writing with my hard-earned dough. Vote with your wallet, here, kids: dollar signs, or the lack thereof, are what matter to publishers, and refusing to patronize this trash sends a loud and clear message.
I realize that I'm pretty harsh in this review, but I think it's warranted, and I hope reviews like this (and there are quite a few for this sorry excuse for a novel) dissuade like-minded "authors" from sending this kind of boring, mindless dumpster fodder out into the world. Books like these irk me no end, first and foremost because they're nothing more than shameless ass-kissing, penned by people with no talent... with a $20 price tag.
This book is great at one thing, however: it's a great example of everything wrong with modern fiction writing. This is a straight-up, master-class work on how to shoehorn into a poorly-conceived narrative boring, highly (even offensively) stereotyped, soulless characters with no realism, which apparently isn't supposed to matter these days, as long as they check off each and every diversity box under the rainbow, and better yet, create some new ones. No self-respecting publishing house would give something like this the time of day if it didn't include all the ABC characters drawn from a "diversity" laundry list, in an attempt to make a non-starter palatable and perhaps sell-able.
In addition to the grotesque characters, I think what bothered me the most was the insufferably bad writing, which, honestly, had all the sophistication of a short story written by a middle-schooler... except, every now and again, you come across one of those who has talent. Most of the paragraphs are little more than a few sentences long, with short, ill-composed sentences that are awkwardly worded. The writing was just... hokey as hell. Example: descriptions like, "a wraith of guilt wrapped around his neck the way an infant chimpanzee clings to its mother."
Um... wat?
What the hell kind of imagery is THAT supposed to evoke? Just... puerile and dumb. And the rest of it isn't any better. The prose is chock-full of these weird analogies which make absolutely no sense.
I'm not even going to bother with a synopsis of the plot, because it didn't really have one. It jump-cut to a new scene every few pages, which is difficult to pull off effectively even in a well-conceived and sophisticated novel written by a talented author. It certainly didn't work here, because none of it made any sense.
I just straight-up hated this crappy book. I did finish it, but the best part was that it took me little more than about 90 minutes to do so. Steer clear of this one; it's a waste of 90 minutes of your life. In fact, I think I'll conclude with one of my favorite quotes, by Tom Waits: âThe world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."
Amen.
