Blender Babies

By: Jon Athan

Narrated by: Jamal West

Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

They called it: "The Craze."

No one saw it coming. It started with isolated reports of people kidnapping babies and blending them to drink their "essence"—a highly potent and highly addictive chemical compound found in infants. The phenomenon spread through social media, infecting other addicts. Cases of kidnapping and murder—femicide and infanticide—skyrocketed, leading to governments around the world to issue state of emergencies and strict shelter-at-home orders.

But it was too late.

Society had collapsed into itself.

Now, Brian Turner finds himself trapped in a police station with his family—his wife Leslie, his five-year-old son Cameron, and his newborn daughter Harper—and a group of shellshocked survivors. With their supplies running low and a horde of baby-fiends waiting to strike outside, he must find a way to protect his family and search for a new home away from the carnage and madness.

Jon Athan, the author of The Groomer and Lovesick, presents a disturbing post-apocalyptic vision unlike anything he’s written before. Can you survive the Craze?

WARNING: This book contains graphic content. Listener discretion is advised.

©2023 Jonathan Sixtos (P)2023 Jonathan Sixtos

Applauding

Listen to this now! No doubt a 5 star! Thanks for putting this on Audio!

Unique Post-Apocolyptic Story

Overall, this is a solid and enjoyable listen. The universe is set up pretty well and there's a solid background. I like the characters and the buildup for events was well executed. The biggest issue with this read was the performance. The narrator is good at getting emotions across and distinguishing characters, however when the action picks up and the characters get louder there's an insane amount of popping from the microphone that makes it to where you cannot understand what is said. This only happened a couple times but it wasn't enough to turn me away from continuing to listen. This was my first Jon Athan novel and I'm keen to listen to more!

Horrible Audio

I couldn't finish this, the audio was too terrible to ignore. Everytime he'd raise his voice to emulate yelling or shouting it would crackle horribly.

extreme to the max

completely new for twist for him. the post apocalyptic thing is new for Jon. very entertaining but not for the easily offended or disgusted. for an extreme horror fan it is great.

Omg

This book had me on my toes the entire time. This is my first time listening to a horror audiobook but some parts had me squmishis but I enjoyed the book!!!

Microphone pops throughout the story?

I have no clue what was going on with the audio but the microphone pops were out of control. Every time the narrator sped up when they were speaking and using letters like B and P the audio would just give out. I tried my best to enjoy the story and the narration, but this was a major issue.

shock and awe

I absolutely loved the story! I could put it down, I was literally needing to know what would happen next. the narrator was amazing at expressing the fear and anger in each character. my only complaint is the audio popping at points of "yelling" it pulled me out of the immersion. but I stil highly recommend it!

bad audio quality

story is good, narrator was ok but audio quality was really bad and he lowers his voice too much.

Audio quality is horrible

I'm sorry. I can't even finish this title because each time the narrator gets excited, the audio cuts out because his microphone short circuits when there's too much volume. The narration is so insanely choppy in sections that half the narration gets completely cut off.

Like... It's genuinely appalling that the author/publisher listened to this file and were like "yeah... this is good enough to sell to people."

As for the story itself: I saw someone online recommend this because it was "more than just splatterpunk." I love me some splatterpunk. I love gnarly stories. 90 Minutes into Blender Babies, it's just "meh." Maybe it gets better later, but the prose itself is mediocre and the characters just don't make sense.

For example: There's a mother with her kids in a room where a bunch of people are talking about disgusting stuff. She's like "Hey, don't say nasty things around my kid." Then she proceeds to wait around while everyone just... keeps escalating and talking about gross stuff, and then when the author remembered there were children in the scene, the mom suddenly is like "okay that's too far, we're leaving."

The characters lack authenticity. The premise could have been interesting, but the author just handwaves the logistics of it rather than flesh out HOW the world fell into chaos, or WHY this new drug caught on. I know. Maybe I'm expecting too much from a novel called BLENDER BABIES. But c'mon. If you're going to have a wild premise, at least make it interesting.

If the audio ever gets fixed, I'll give this another shot. But until then, it's literally painful to listen to.

audio sucks Real bad.

I'm not sure if this is an AI reader or not but the recording is very very unlistenable