The premise for this story was really intriguing and instantly attracted me, but the writing, spelling, and formatting quality was appalling. This was a free - well not an ebook - it came as a text file! I had to convert it to to an ebook in order to read it on my phone which is my normal book reading device.
The story started out fair enough. This guy Jeremy has the ability to will into existence anything he sees in a picture in a magazine. The story didn't mention things he sees on TV or in movies, or other media, which was disappointing. He seemed not to have experimented much, although there was a very brief mention of something to do with Polaroids and that was about it - at least in the 25% of this I could stand to read.
The things he generates through this method are real while they exist, but they are impermanent, and they disappear as soon as he sleeps, or when the object is encased in lead (or 'led' as the author insists upon writing it). He can make money through, say, materializing a diamond ring and pawning it, but he also seems to have some sort of an income of which we learn nothing in the portion of this novel that I read, so Jeremy is very much a mystery.
Not only can he create objects and machines from the pictures he sees, he can also manifest real people, who sometimes are mere shells of people, and other times much more autonomous. While he claims to have explored this, we’re told - not shown - it, so in the quarter of the novel I read, there was no such manifestation or interaction, nor any sex, I might add.
I wasn't as concerned about that as I was about the author's naming his novel with a title which fails to describe the content accurately. It felt like bait and switch to me. I don't mind sex in a novel if it's reasonably and realistically done, and it;s not gratuitous, but if you offer it and don't deliver it, it's nothing mroe than bait and switch, and it may alienate oyur readers. Also, when you then fail to deliver on any good sci-fi and start instead lecturing your readers on your own personal world view, you quickly lose my interest.
The one woman who shows up in Jeremy's life (based on the portion I read), is named Tory, and she claims to be a witch. We never get any of Jeremy's magazine creations to see what they're like or to run any sort of comparison between them and her. Nor did I learn why she shows up, or has such an interest in him, or even how she learned about him, and he seems to have no curiosity about any of these questions, which makes Jeremy a thoroughly boring charcter, as is Tory herself.
Jeremy also seems to be able - unintentionally - to shut down electronic devices, yet he's able to will a motor vehicle into existence and drive it, so why he doesn't screw-up the electrics and electronics of a car or an airplane he wills into existence, yet does this to other stuff went disappointingly unexplained. This kind of thing bothered me. It felt like lazy writing or inattentive at least. The whole novel went downhill about a quarter of the way in when it felt like the author was lecturing us about his personal pet peeves and his favorite things rather than getting on with telling a story. Until then it hadn't been too bad, but that turned me right off and I quit reading it at that point. Maybe the questions and issues I had are answered later in the novel, but I had no interest at that point in reading on to find out.
The problem with this novel is that it seemed to me rather like it might be more of an exercise in authorial wish-fulfillment than in a good-faith effort to tell a story, but even then it felt like the author got off-track about a quarter the way in, and lost the thread of what had been quite interesting until, then despite some issues. I kept reading, hoping he would get back to the story, but he didn’t seem interested in going there, which is why I gave up on it.
There were a lot of formatting and grammatical errors in the text. Here are a few that I noted: "Caucasian, bald, go-t beard" (should have read, 'goatee beard' - or just 'goatee') "Farah Faucet" (Fawcett - why she gets a mention rather than someone more recently popular seems to speak volumes about the author!) "Give me a brake" (break!) "DnD" as opposed to the more common (and more intelligible) "D&D" for Dungeons and Dragons. "The wanded him down" (They) Character Maria becomes Mary at one point in the story Scotish (when Scottish was intended, but probably should really be just 'Scots'). "I get carried away sometime." (should read 'sometimes') "people in harms way (should be 'harm's') There's a character named Shuri whose name is usually but not always shown with a lower cased 'S'
As far as writing is concerned, the author put in a awful lot of 'he said she said' in conversations. Of course a long conversation between two or more people can be confusing if it’s never identified who is saying what, but you don't need to put 'said' and asked' after every quoted speech. This author did, and it was really irritating and made the text sound like machine-gun fire. Below is an example (with the actual content of the speech removed and just shown as two sets of quotes: ""), and only the identifying parts are left in, so you can see what I mean. What's shown below is otherwise unaltered: "" Tory said. "" Jeremy said. "" Tory asked. "" Jeremy said. "" "" Tory said. "" Jeremy asked. "" Tory asked. "" "" Jeremy said. "" Tory asked. "" Jeremy said. "" Tory said. "" Jeremy said. "" Tory said. "" Jeremy said. "" "" Tory said. "" Jeremy asked "" Tory asked "" Jeremy said "" Tory said
Boring! There are creative ways to improve on this without having to employ the robotic he said she said metronomic approach. One thing the author wasn't big on was description and scene setting. Too much of that can be a distraction and lead to a rambling story, especially if it’s not germane to the story, but a little judicious description here and there really helps, and it can also be employed to break-up the rigid tick-tock of a back and forth exchange like this one.
Given the issues and the fact that the story completely and unapologetically derailed itself a quarter of the way through and became a lecture, I can't commend this as a worthy read.
