Rating: WARTY!
This was a DNF for me and it seemed like a real waste of a great title. I think the first problem was that the novel had no good idea what it wanted to be: a fantasy/horror story, or a "procedural" special forces novel. I think it tripped up going back and forth between the two. I made it only 64 pages in, which I think was a fair shot, especially when nothing really happened in that time except the highly improbable - and I'm not even talking about the supernatural! I think I can add some observations and commentary here that I've not seen in other reviews, too.
Actually the first problem was with the main character's name. Do we honestly need yet another in a tediously long line of action adventure novels featuring a main character named Jack? Seriously? Are authors so lacking in imagination that they go to trope as soon as the starting pistol cracks? I am so sick of this clichéd name that I swore off reading any more novels which feature such a character. Somehow I managed to miss that with this one, but it self-corrected! A Navy Seal would not have made that dangerous mistake! Anyway, Jack is training to be a Seal (a contraction of SEa, Air Land). He's four weeks from finishing his SCUBA training (which is only one step in a long training schedule), yet he's pulled out of it by a redheaded woman (who was so obviously destined to be his 'squeeze' that it was pathetic) to join Seal Team 666. How four weeks from the end of a twenty-four week course counts as "half way" through is a mystery, especially when there was more to come, but I let that go since there were worse problems!
This is the worse problem: Jack's specialty is as a sniper. Seal teams count not only on toughness and skill, but also on extensive mission practice leading to working together as a finely-tuned machine. You do not throw a new guy in there right as a mission is setting out! I am not militarily trained, so this is a pure guess on my part, but my guess is that a team like this would rather go one man short than bring in a brand new guy they never even met before, let alone trained with for this specific mission. I think this is especially true when that guy's specialty is sniping and no sniper is needed for this! It wasn't like he had something critical to bring, so this made absolutely no sense at all to me, because it presented such a ripe opportunity to get one or more of the team killed because of some misstep or miscue. I cannot see how this would have been countenanced.
They were operating on US soil, too, which seemed even more odd. The author justified it by saying that there is no police SWAT team trained to deal with the supernatural, but they really were not dealing with the supernatural - they were simply gathering intelligence from some Chinese guys who they knew were in this building. It was at this point in the story where the author wrote: "Walker had been watching the Chinaman's eyes." Does that sound a bit racist to you?
I talked with a couple of people (neither of whom is Chinese!) about this, and they didn't think it was any big deal, but to me it sounded off at best, and racist at worst. If this was someone's speech in the story, I can see how he might say something like that. Even the narrator might say it if the novel was told in first person PoV, but for a writer to put that in the narration when it's third person and not part of some character's speech, seems off to me. This guy who writes this used to be army intelligence which might explain a lot. He's now, apparently, defense intelligence, which also might explain a lot. It just seemed strange.
Aside from that, the story was just not interesting. The author seemed far more attached to spewing Tom Clancy-style technical descriptions than ever he was in telling a cool story about military men facing off against the supernatural. He couldn't simply say, for example, "he cleaned his gun" or "he fired his pistol" without providing a mini-description of the weapon every time. It had to be, "he cleaned his Super 90" or "he fired his MP5", which quickly became tedious in short order and irritating right afterwards. Here's one example of a partial paragraph so you get the boring idea:
And also like the M16 and the AR15, the Stoner used a gas-impingement system to automatically move the bolt back and forth, enabling semiautomatic fire down the twenty-inch barrel. Rather than the regular floating barrel, the Stoner was reworked to incorporate the URX 11 Picatiny-Weaver Rail System, allowing for better application of any mounted hardware such as laser sights, telescopic sights, reflexive sights, tactical lights and forward grips.
Now I don't doubt that there are readers out there who like stories larded with this techno-jargon, but I really don't care about it and it gets annoying when it looks like the author is more interested in showing off how much research he did, than in moving the story along nicely. It failed to grab me and I decided after a very short debate, that there were far too many other books out there begging to be read, for me to waste any more of my time on one which doesn't thrill me from the outset. This is the start of a series, and I sure didn't want to read any more of this one volume let alone another one like it.
