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The Imago Sequence
- And Other Stories
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
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Publisher's summary
The title story of this collection - a devilishly ironic riff on H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" - was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, while "Probiscus" was nominated for an International Horror Guild award and reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 19. In addition to his previously published work, this collection contains an original story.
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After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral 11-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face-to-face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution, Pete slowly earns a measure of trust from this paranoid survivalist itching for a final conflict that will signal the coming End Times. But as Pete's own family spins out of control, Pearl's activities spark the full-blown interest of the FBI, putting Pete at the center of a massive manhunt from which no one will emerge unscathed.
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The Ghost of Tom Joad & the Wrath of Grapes
- By Mel on 06-30-14
By: Smith Henderson
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Illegal
- A Novel
- By: Paul Levine
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Trial lawyer Jimmy “Royal” Payne was his own worst enemy - until now. Haunted by personal tragedy and wanted by the cops, Payne needs to skip town. What he doesn’t need is Tino Perez, a gutsy twelve-year-old Mexican boy in search of his missing - and undocumented - mother. But Payne’s ex-wife, an L.A.P.D. detective he still loves, makes him a deal: help the boy or go to jail. Soon Payne is following Tino into the darker side of the American dream.
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Great opening chapters; very vivid characters!
- By Wayne on 01-31-16
By: Paul Levine
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Burning Chrome
- By: William Gibson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Dennis Holland, Kevin Pariseau, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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William Gibson's dark visions of computer cowboys, bio-enhanced soldiers of fortune, and hi-tech lowlifes have won unprecedented praise. Included here are some of the most famous short fiction and novellas by the author of Count Zero and Neuromancer.
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abstract art
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-05-14
By: William Gibson
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Make Something Up
- Stories You Can't Unread
- By: Chuck Palahniuk
- Narrated by: Chuck Palahniuk, Scott Sowers, Rich Orlow, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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For years Chuck Palahniuk has reserved his best storytelling for his readings, often choosing to read a new short story instead of whatever novel he is supposed to be promoting. Make Something Up compiles these previously unpublished tales for the very first time, plus the Byliner social media insta-classic "Phoenix" and Palahniuk's most notable pieces from Playboy.
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Plenty of shock, just not enough Palahniuk awe
- By Darwin8u on 06-10-15
By: Chuck Palahniuk
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Blackbirds
- Miriam Black, Book 1
- By: Chuck Wendig
- Narrated by: Emily Beresford
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Miriam Black knows when you will die. Still in her early twenties, she’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, suicides, and slow deaths by cancer. But when Miriam hitches a ride with truck driver Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days he will be gruesomely murdered while he calls her name. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. No matter what she does, she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.
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Not for the faint of heart or kids but exciting
- By Steph on 04-07-14
By: Chuck Wendig
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Vampires in the Lemon Grove
- Stories
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Joy Osmanski, Kaleo Griffith, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" find Russell veering into more sinister territory.
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Stylish modern magic realism
- By Ryan on 04-10-13
By: Karen Russell
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
- A Novel
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Peter Riegert
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the federal district of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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Didn't finish...
- By Ann E O'Connor on 10-16-17
By: Michael Chabon
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The Long Way Down
- Daniel Faust, Book 1
- By: Craig Schaefer
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobody knows the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas like Daniel Faust, a sorcerer for hire and ex-gangster who uses black magic and bullets to solve his clients' problems. When an old man comes seeking vengeance for his murdered granddaughter, what looks like a simple job quickly spirals out of control. Soon Daniel stands in the crossfire between a murderous porn director; a corrupt cop with a quick trigger finger; and his own former employer, a racket boss who isn't entirely human.
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Urban fantasy noir. Done right..
- By Cliff on 02-19-15
By: Craig Schaefer
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Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Frustrating and unsatisfying
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Great Writer - Good story - VERY Wrong Reader,
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Decent First Foray into Crime Fiction for Barron
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Nanashi was born into a life of violence. Delivered from the mean streets by the Heron Clan, he mastered the way of the gun and knife and swiftly ascended through yakuza ranks to become a dreaded enforcer. His latest task? He and an entourage of expert killers are commanded to kidnap Muzaki, a retired world-renowned wrestler under protection of the rival Dragon Syndicate. It should be business as bloody usual for Nanashi and his ruthless brothers-in-arms.
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I like this
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John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection includes nine of his substantial stories.
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Forgot the Horror
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Frustrating and unsatisfying
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Isaiah Coleridge is a mob enforcer in Alaska - he's tough, seen a lot, and dished out more. But when he forcibly ends the money-making scheme of a made man, he gets in the kind of trouble that can lead to a bullet behind the ear. Saved by the grace of his boss and exiled to upstate New York, Isaiah begins a new life, a quiet life without gunshots or explosions. Except a teenage girl disappears, and Isaiah isn't one to let that slip by. And delving into the underworld to track this missing girl will get him exactly the kind of notice he was warned to avoid.
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Decent First Foray into Crime Fiction for Barron
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Poor Narration
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Incredible!
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In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.
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Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies
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John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with ten new tales of cosmic horror in Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies. In these stories, he continues to chart the course of twenty-first century weird fiction, from the unfamiliar to the familial, the unfathomably distant to the intimate.
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Finally more John Langan in audiobook form
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The Gods of H. P. Lovecraft
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The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft: a brand new anthology that collects the 12 principal deities of the Lovecraftian Mythos and sets them loose. Featuring the biggest names in horror and dark fantasy, including many New York Times best sellers; full of original fiction; and individual commentary on each of the deities by Donald Tyson.
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Great story... hard to listen to
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Millie Two Bears lives alone in a trailer in the heart of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. Since her husband went to jail, she’s been on the outs with the reservation. And it’s not just people she has to contend with. Now the prairie dogs are moving in on her patch of land. When a strange woman comes into Millie’s life, and Millie’s rodent war escalates, a fateful confrontation with vengeance, secrets, and survival is just underfoot.
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The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
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His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy.
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Sad and honest
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Brothers Macbeth and Drederick Tooms should have it made as fair-haired scions of an impossibly rich and powerful family of industrialists. Alas, life is complicated in mid-1950s USA when you're child heirs to the throne of Sword Enterprises, a corporation that has enshrined Machiavelli's The Prince as its operating manual. Consider also those long, cruel winters at the Mountain Leopard Boarding School for Assassins in the Himalayas, or that Dad may be a supervillain, while an uncle occasionally slaughters his nephews and nieces for sport.
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Signature dark crazy nastiness plus fun
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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 4
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With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
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In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story.
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The Horror of Loss
- By Jim N on 04-20-17
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Teatro grottesco
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Autore di culto della letteratura americana contemporanea, restio alle attenzioni dei media ma autenticamente seminale - suoi gli incubi che hanno ispirato la prima stagione di "True Detective" -, Thomas Ligotti è unanimamente considerato l'unico, grande successore di Edgar Allan Poe e H.P. Lovecraft.
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Not in English.....
- By Amazon Customer on 04-23-23
By: Thomas Ligotti
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Sleepless
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The world is in the grip of an epidemic of sleeplessness and one man will risk everything to find out what caused it. In his signature style of fast-paced action, outrageous violence, and graphically described scenes, we are tossed into a dramatic turbulence unlike anything you've ever read or heard.
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Stunning
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What listeners say about The Imago Sequence
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Zachary
- 03-14-20
Agonizingly Dull and Meaningless
Full disclosure - I couldn't sit still for all of this.
The most interesting story I read from start to finish took AGES to build up to "he was always dead...sort of - don't ask".
After listening further started to feel like slowly cranking a vice shut on my head, I began skipping around, listening for a few seconds here and there, searching for SOMETHING interesting. Every story I sampled like that just droned on and on and on like a rambling drunk who loves the sound of his own voice. NOWHERE did I land where something engaging was happening; the author's tone manages to make even slightly curious things like a man's face getting chewed off sound about as intense as a shopping list.
It doesn't help that Laird Barron is absolutely addicted to the kind of flowery, pace-strangling metaphor that infests the pages of the literary "classics" they force-feed you in school; you might drag yourself through six or seven increasingly florid parenthetical statements only to discover that it was all symbolic, just a really painful way to describe the 'difficulty' of choosing whether to be as boring as grass growing or paint drying. I think my favorite part was when I landed on a spot that sounded halfway promising, with bubbling in a lagoon and ichor and darkness, and it ended with the narrator deliberately looking away. Cue sarcastic clapping - book goes in the bin.
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24 people found this helpful
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- W. Warren
- 06-27-19
Embracing the Cosmic Horror within
First off, I will say that this was an enjoyable read, and if you are at all interested in expanding your scope of cosmic horror, this will be a great addition to your repertoire.
If you are like me and found this collection via a search for contemporary cosmic horror, AND you are a dyed-in-the-wool H.P. Lovecraft fan and are expecting an exacting replica of his work, then I believe you will be disappointed; while the spirit of the “law” as it were is there, the letter definitely is not. Stories in this collection proffer a very “sink or swim” style that, while more organic than the very clinical and exactingly dry Lovecraftian style, does not give you much to go on when trying to decipher motive and inclination of the characters telling the story; you will find that unlike Lovecraft’s “survivors” who more often than not lived to tell their tale despite their madness and end their wretched life on their own terms, Barron’s characters are “happened upon” and found to be narrating their own individual madness as it unfurls without deference to a potential future reader’s humours or misgivings.
I must admit I was personally a tad disappointed in how the involuntarily antagonistic “evils” found in these tales were less “Bestiary of Cosmic Madness” and more “Dictionnaire Infernal”; while the execution ended up enjoyable, I will admit to hoping for recognizably adherent additions to the overall Lovecraftian Mythos (i.e.: this is not a Cthulhu Mythos collection). I will also admit to sometimes being left markedly hungry after the conclusion of each story, as often the through-line of each tended to unravel and fray (no doubt in parallel to the characters’ sanities); while I appreciate this as a device, sometimes I wanted something a little more concrete.
All this being said, I enjoyed this book, and I do feel that the definite nods to Lovecraft are appreciable by those who are and who are not aware of the cosmic horror legacy. All in all, I would say that this collection is 80% of the spirit of Lovecraftian Horror with 5% of the racism (and to that point, any racism you may find in this book is more incidental to individual characters and not so nauseatingly ingrained into the very fabric of the story and writing itself). I liked this collection and kind of wish to read it again as I get the feeling that my attentions were trained on finding the familiar and may well have missed devices and plot points exclusive to the author; if you need more cosmic horror in your life (and honestly, who doesn’t?) then I definitely recommend this collection.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Daniel Wiffen
- 07-18-19
Dear god what is that?!
This collection stories is quite interesting because the concept of a happy ending is relative. Imago will come for you and you die screaming. I recommend this for any Lovecraft enthusiast and lover of the dark recesses of fantasy and sci-fi.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Paul Griswold
- 12-29-20
Pornographic and boring?
I'm returning & deleting this one. I fell asleep while listening (it's a bit of a snooze fest) and when I woke up, I got to hear Ray Porter saying something like, "she wrapped her lips tightly around his c**k" and that was the end for me.
It's like someone asked a high school-aged boy to write what they think a fantasy porno would sound like. Zero imagination, poor writing, terrible vocabulary.
How do things like that make it past the editor?
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13 people found this helpful
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- Michael Mangan
- 08-26-21
A comment on Bad Reviews
I read a number of reviews complaining that the stories in this book don’t have an ending or worse, simply trail off in the middle. I completely disagree. These stories are great and fascinating. They all have very clear endings. The stories assume that the reader will have a very basic understanding of human history and historical horror and some very basic mythology e.g. Christian devils and witches, Native Americans witches or evil, the Hindu God Shiva, that kind of thing. But even if you don’t have any real understanding of history, all the stories have clear endings.
Hint: The writer is borrowing from historic myths and imagining what it would be like to encounter one - like a Native American witch or the Hindu God Shiva - in modern day America.
The stories are interesting and imaginative and the horror is good.
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9 people found this helpful
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- John Allred
- 09-29-18
fantastic!
This collection was superb! I will always be a fan of Laird Barron!. I look forward to his next collection!
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7 people found this helpful
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- Vermillion
- 09-05-20
No straight answers
The narrator did a bang-up job. And it is abundantly clear to me that Barron is a very gifted writer. But this audiobook is like a tale told by a man who is both drunk and high out of his mind. If he doesn’t pass out on you before a story properly concludes, he raves so that one cannot be satisfied that a particular story has a point. I also do not share Barron’s admiration of HP Lovecraft’s fictional work. I would have straight answers from our tale bearer but he cannot be relied upon. Was it worth the time I spent listening? I do not know.
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- Shawn S.
- 10-06-21
Great Cthulhu Mythos short stories
A great collection of Cthulhu Mythos short fiction. Several of the stories are real gems. Extra kudos to the author for bringing the Mythos to South Puget Sound.
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- Hugenoot
- 08-29-19
Enjoyed it so much that I got it on Kindle aswell
Some of the stories have lodged in my imagination. The narrator is good and suits the author's hard-boiled characters, although I would say his imitation of female voices made me uncomfortable and comes across as a bit sexist.
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- Christian Torres
- 08-15-19
Waste of Time, Amateur Writing
Many other reviews bring this up, and I'm going to emphasize it. The author wastes WAY too much time writing up long backstories for these people and introducing characters... none of which matter whatsoever.
It's the potted plant problem. Even the most amateur novelist will tell you the simple truth of not creating pointless characters. But too frequently, the author creates a character who could be replaced by a silent potted plant and the story would go on with minimal adjustments.
It's also the talking head problem. The majority of the characters I saw in these works exists SOLELY as an excuse for the main character to speak their mind to someone. They become talking heads that take little to no actual influence on the story, who serve as nothing but an expository tool.
Now imagine... these stories use potted plants as expository tools.
There is nothing wrong with worldbuilding or giving your characters life. But your side characters need to be actors, not posters. I'm sorry but I'll say it. The stories in this collection were amateur AT BEST.
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