Author: Tim Curran
Publisher: Dark Fuse
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Erratum:
Page 133 "Roach Hotel" should be "Roach Motel"
With this novel, page one is the front cover, and the cover is better than the novel - but as usual, the cover doesn't honestly represent anything that happens between the covers. I've been seeing this (the cover is page one) a lot in books I've reviewed lately. This means that the novel doesn't start until page six, and runs to page 268, so roughly 260 pages all told. Some of them were really good!
This is my first experience of this author, Tim Curran, and of this publisher, Dark Fuse, and I have to say that my initial impression was that the first thirty pages were what makes it worth trudging through the really bad stuff to find a novel like this. It’s like working a month in a crappy factory job just so you save enough for that decent pair of pants you need. It’s like sweating on a treadmill every day for a week so you can enjoy that little piece of cheesecake you promised yourself. It’s like seeing your kids, fresh-faced, energetic and vital, after a lousy day at work. Unfortunately, that feeling didn't last.
Chazz Akely, Creep Rodgers, Danielle LeCarr, Lex Fontaine, Ramona Lake and Soo-Lee Chang are driving home after a night out. Chazz is drunk as a skunk on junk, but he flatly refused Ramona's sober offer to drive. He was that kind of a dick. He missed the turn-off and ended up in a pissant village named Stokes. A village that hasn’t existed for half a century. As they careered into town, a figure steps out in front of the van which naturally rolled right over it. When Ramona finally convinced Chazz to go look at what they'd just hit, he agreed only because the van had stalled and wouldn’t start, so he couldn't drive away.
What the six of them hit in that van was so bizarre that none of them could believe it. I don’t want to give any more details - which will make it hard to write a review! - because the story is creepy and to this point it was good. It was one of those which makes you want to turn one page after another without stopping until you get to the end, but after around page 100, it made me want to turn pages simply to get it over with. The characters are alive and full of life, but for how long?
What’s chasing them around crazy town is also alive, but really it’s not. And no, it’s not zombies, although those of you who like zombie stories will likely feel right at home here. I don’t like zombie stories, but this one engrossed me. Who wouldn’t feel it for six young people who are trapped in a nightmarish world which seems to defy not only the laws of logic, but even those of physics? Their world now is one from which there seems to be no exit and which seems to change its nature even as they stand watching in stark, terrified disbelief.
There were some instances of bad grammar, such as "So when do we started acting?" on page 79, but in general, at first, the writing was good, dramatic, and inviting to read. it started out like this was no dumb-ass bunch of teens running round doing stupid, thoughtless stuff in the face of a psycho killer. But they deteriorated quickly. Around page 100, the whole novel went into a slump from which it never recovered. It was, at that point through to the end, nothing but rehashed "horrific" situations - the same thing that had happened before - changed slightly - but essentially repeated over and over again, and it was outright boring.
Indeed, it was so bad that it became a comedy rather than horror, with characters being killed off one-by-one in a manner just like your standard teen horror B-grade movie. That was when I checked out. I found myself skimming paragraphs, then pages, then chapters because it was no longer interesting to me. Eventually, I said, "The hell with it!" and I skipped to the last twenty pages just to see if the ending was any good. It was predictable, if you want to call that good, but predictable in the way the teen B horror movies are predictable - with the same kind of twist ending. I can't recommend this unless you just want to read the just first 100 pages or so!
