Collection: Volume 1

By: Austyn Shull

Narrated by: Matt Jenkins

Length: 1 hr and 37 mins

Publisher's Summary

Collection is a series of volumes that follows several once-ordinary people as they are thrown into their now abnormal lives. Vampires, aliens, time travel, flight, superpowers - if you have any of these, then you will become property of the Collection, an underground containment facility that makes sure the world of the unknown stays unknown. But when Jerry attempts to transport himself through time, a freak storm wreaks havoc while a meteor shower fast approaches Earth. 

Aliens, dragons, vampires, superpowers...everything that shouldn't be known is on the Collection's collection list.

©2012 Austyn Shull (P)2020 Austyn Shull

Good start for a new series

Great collection of a collection…. You’d have to read it for that to make sense. Anyway it’s a cool concept and I’m interested in where it’s going.
Narration by Matt Jenkins was great.
I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

"Umm...."

This is my second reading of Collection but my first review. After the first experience - and that is really what it is rather than simply a read - I was mentally speechless and left writing about it in the hope that something approaching understanding would materialize. It didn't. Better luck this second time around? Not really, except ...
For a short book of only about one and one half hours, a rerun after only about four months it could easily have been tedious. It wasn't, not at all. But still a bit, well, confusing is the word which springs instantly to mind. Centred around a handful of characters who find themselves in extraordinary and scary circumstances, the story moves across a fragmented universe, not one we'd really recognise as our own, even if it is about Earth, or the Other Earth, perhaps.

Narration is by Matt Jenkins who copes pretty well with the unusual text and character voices. More suited to the captions and conversations of graphic art, it is visual, fragmented and just a tad crazy. Presented in six episodes, it certainly keeps the reader entertajned.

My thanks to the rights holder of Collection I, who, at my request, freely gifted me with a complimentary copy via Audiobook Boom. It didn't feel right but it isn't boring.

Disjointed and poorly-narrated

This story felt like a committee got together with a bunch of different ideas for what the story should be and decided to include everyone's ideas to make them happy. You've got dragons, vampires, aliens and secret government agencies to name a few. While the author does try to tie it all together, nothing is every really well-established enough for you to get a full grasp (or even care) before you're whisked off to something else.

Sadly, the same goes for the characters. Aside from Mr Sun and Moon, I can't really remember any others. They mostly sounded the same due to the narration (except for Mr Moon -- I'm not even Asian and I'm slightly offended by the stereotypical manner in which it was read) and no one really stood out

Speaking of narration, though Matt Jenkins has a voice that's easy-enough to listen to, he tends to read everything in an exasperated quiet sort of yell. Most people sound the same and the intonations seem to be way off from how the text reads. Sadly, I don't feel he helped the story any.

This book was provided to me for free in exchange for my honest review. If you want a fairly mindless romp, then it's short enough to provide some entertainment, but don't expect anything thought-provoking.

Asteroids, Aliens and Vamps, Oh my!

This is a rather strange little story which is clearly intended to be the introduction to a continuing series about a group of friends who get mixed up in a strange reality of alternate earths, vampires, supes, aliens and big rocks hitting the earth. It's a bit hard to follow and keep all of the characters sorted out although I suspect that might get a lot easier as the series progresses.
Anyway, it's an interesting read if you're a fan of that stream of consciousness gamer literature that's so popular these days.