The Ship

By: Doug Brode

Narrated by: Zachary Johnson

Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's Summary

Casey Stevens awakens within a crashed alien vessel 35 years after she was abducted. Navigating inverted tunnels, she’s plagued by ghostly apparitions from her past and stalked by a ravenous, mutated experiment gone horribly wrong. When Casey discovers her own body is changing - becoming blotched with grey, scaly patches - she fears she may face the same fate as the once-human creature that now hunts her.

Taking inspiration from 1990’s science-fiction tropes, such as alien abduction, UFO coverups, and mutant hybrids, author Doug Brode offers a new twist on familiar themes and plays against the listener's expectations at every turn. The deeper you delve inside The Ship, the more terrible the answers become. The truth is not what you think.

©2020 Doug Brode (P)2021 Alien Sky Publishing

Very enjoyable good story

Book moves quickly along and maintains your interest. Good story. Looking forward to next book “ships revenge”. Great read for all ages. I would buy it again

Whoa, Now, Where Are We Going!

Doug wove a fantastic story, and Zachary trimmed it with a gilted edge! As the story unfolded, and unfolded, and unfolded, Zachary's marvelous narration submerged me and and the folds the Doug opened kept my mind fully engaged. Time can always be re-written... and a monitor can display 16 million colors... and we can only perceive what we perceive... Loved it!

Fun and totally unexpected!

The Ship was recommended by a friend who knows how much I love a good alien thriller. I was surprised where the story went. The author takes a lot of familiar ideas we’ve all seen before, only to then completely flip them halfway through. This book really plays with your expectations. And, wow, what an ending!

Ok for a movie, not so much for a book

The story of The Ship is a confusing one as it is trying to be a lot of different things all at once. What is good here is the setup and the tone. Ominous and creepy settings stand out in the story. Where those settings fail is in the characters who only just freak out or befall the stereotypical weasley guy who's going to screw over everyone in the end.

The story involves time travel, alien/human hybrid monster zombies, flying saucers, future humanity, and of course "aliens". The confusing aspect is that I didn't see the plot laid down enough once you had storyline plot points revealed to make clear or to clarify over time what was going on. While the atmosphere lends to some ominous build-up, the characters either operate on freakout mode or yelling. For some characters that makes sense but the reason to have many different characters in your story is that you bring in different personality types to explore the world made for them. The conclusion of the story makes it hard to believe that the events leading up to what the antagonist(s) want would have occurred in the early part of the story.

If this were a novella or a shorter story, the repetitive occurrences with some of the main characters could have really been streamlined. As I was reading this I thought the action and characters read more like a screenplay for a movie. I checked the author's other credits and sure enough, he has a background in movies. I could see this story being a DVD direct movie. However, as a book, I didn't enjoy it as much. The very end of the story however offered an interesting twist that I would have liked to have had flushed out more.

Final Grade - D+

Hard to connect with characters but good idea

I received a free review copy of this audio book, at my request, and am voluntarily leaving this unbiased review.

This book has a very interesting premise. An alien ship takes people and crashes in the forest. I won't spoil anything but suffice to say this book combines Alien abduction, time travel and military sci fi. It blends all these genres together and does it well.

The characters are well rounded, with deep back stories. Even secondary characters are shown to have complex emotions and well written back stories. The story is rounded to include these glimpses of their complexity and does a good job at making the characters feel real.

Unfortunately, the story is too disjointed to effectively hold my attention and get me to feel for the characters struggles. It's one thing to have well written characters, but that's not enough. The story still has to connect, and with 3 POV's shifting constantly, with a 4th thrown in one section, I found it hard to connect with the characters.

The shifting POV's was too frequent and I found that when I was just getting into a section, or started caring about a character the POV/situation would shift and it would break. I feel it would have been better to carry sections and character POV's longer, to establish a better connection to the narrative and to generally zig zag through the story less.

The environments at the beginning of the book were interesting, at least in side the ship was. It was a little weird and different and definitely had a sense of dread. As the book progressed, things were a bit more samey, earth town, woods, etc. But things change a bit towards the end, and that was well done.

The most notable thing, for me, is that this author gets what it is to be a parent. So many books, even really well known and well written books, will have a man struggling to find his wife or girlfriend, and the kid is an after thought. Blake Crouch's Dark Matter has a guy desperately trying to find his wife, with little thought on his son. Dennis E Taylor's Singularity Trap has a guy who is crushed to know he will never hold his wife again. And never seeing his kid again is an afterthought.

This book however, gets it. Arthur wants the love of his life back, but not at the expense of his 2 sons. Reese's main reason to live is to get back to his 4 year old daughter. I'm glad that this author understand what a typical fathers priorities really are.

Voice narration, by Zachary Johnson, is not bad. He has a sense of urgency, when needed and his male voices are different enough to tell one character from the next. He doesn't really have a female voice, so one of the main characters being a woman becomes a bit of an issue. He doesn't do a bad job at her, exactly, just no attempt at a female voice.

Ultimately, this is a pretty OK book. It has some interesting concepts and the author seems to understand being a parent. The characters are well written and there is a lot of attention to back stories. The narrator doesn't even try to do a female voice (for the female lead) was disappointing. However, the main stumbling point is that the constant switching of POV's becomes not only a distraction but also kept me from being invested in the characters or their struggles.

Best scifi ride!!

I was given a free copy of this audio book in exchange for an honest review. And, here it is. Absolutely, hands down some of the best scifi I've read in a while. I'm a fan of the genre, and this one nails all the boxes with twists to fuel the flame. Character development was awesome and very detailed. Enough so that you were emotionally involved with all of them, right until the very end. I've not had a can't put down scifi book like this one, in I can't tell you how long. If you like intense scifi, are a fan of Star Wars, Alien, and even Stargate, you're gonna love this one. Zachary Johnson did a phenomenal job at narrating from start to finish. He helped fuel Mr Brode's words, and brought the book to life. Great job guys. I'm looking for more. This one brought me back to my first love, audio books. Amazing read, and listen. Give it a shot, and yeah. Hold on, it's gonna take off.